BARRY J FREEMAN

The Wanted, Barry Freeman's new novel, is a crime thriller for thoughtful readers. The book features respected lawyer, Benjamin Diamond, who is pushing 70 and retiring after many successful years as the head of an esteemed Chicago law firm. He lives with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two golden retrievers in their Highland Park, Illinois, steel and glass dream house on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.

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One Sunday, mid-August morning, Ben and Liz take their dogs for a romp on the beach below their house. The dogs come upon an apparent pile of rags, which turns out to be an obliterated corpse. A tailor's nametag too easily enables the police to identify the otherwise unidentifiable body as an international fugitive known as James Terry. Terry is the missing one of three defendants in a criminal case Diamond is defending—his final trial before retirement. James Terry (a.k.a. Sharky) is a sinister gambler and killer, an escapee from a Baghdad jail, wanted by the Baghdad authorities, the FBI, Interpol, the Las Vegas mob, and a wife left destitute and pregnant. Sharky's life has been fatefully entangled with the Diamonds' lives, conceivably as a result of his own free will, the inevitability of determinism, by divine intervention, or a combination thereof (reader’s choice), perhaps from the beginning of the universe through the thrilling conclusion of the book.

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The body on the beach launches the story of Sharky's intriguing odyssey: from his Atlantic City beginnings and maturity into life as a gambler; his troubles in Las Vegas; escape to Baghdad; then to Istanbul; back to Chicago; to Costa Rica; and finally back to the Diamond’s beach. Add to the mix, Taahira, his beautiful Egyptian mistress, and the appearance of Cathy, the talented nineteen year old daughter he’d never seen—and the plot thickens.