Readers Guide to Fifty Fifty by Steve Cavanagh

The Avellino Sisters are arrested

• Wesley Dreyer, the DA, says there will be a joint trial which could result in one or both of the sisters being convicted.
• He offers a plea bargain deal if either sister confesses.
• Eddie lifts Levy’s wallet and finds a mysterious business card inside
• Kate makes the argument to her co-worker that a joint trial could benefit Alexandra, as Sofia is mentally unstable and Alexandra presents as more credible.
• He steals the idea and gives it to Levy, who is also sexually harrassing Kate.

Many Avellinos have ended up dead

• Harper tells Eddie that Frank’s wife Jane (the sisters’ mother) died in an accidental fall AND that Frank’s second wife Heather also took her own life. Interesting.
• Eddie attends the retirement party of his mentor, Harry.
• Eddie and Harper discuss another judge, Stone, who is a member of a white supremacist group. He’s also friendly with Dreyer, the DA.

• Kate, who just quit her job, convinces Alexandra to fire the law firm and hire her.
• The killer, in another anonymous POV, murders a pharmacist
• Kate hires an investigator, Bloch (Melissa Bloch is a character from Twisted, another Steve Cavanagh book) and Levy threatens to sue her.

Trial Prep Begins

• There’s physical evidence implicating both sisters
• Dreyer says he doesn’t care which sister gets convicted
• Both defense teams get to examine the murder scene
• Both sisters take a lie detector test
• The killer realizes that one of the defense teams took a photo that has damning evidence against her
• Harper gets murdered.

Three Months Later

• In her killer POV, one of the sisters tries to make a deal with a guy named Hal Cohen, who is willing to sell his testimony to the highest bidder.
• Eddie also attends Harper’s funeral and talks to a FBI agent named Paige Delaney, who offers to help profile Harper’s killer.
• Then Eddie’s old friend Jimmy the Hat (from a crime family) wants to talk. He was a friend of Frank Avellino’s and Eddie has asked him to confirm that Frank’s death was not an outside job.
• Jimmy says that Jane’s (Frank’s wife’s) autopsy was edited to remove the fact that there was a post-mortem child-size bite mark on her calf. And that Jane was abusive to her daughters.

The Trial Begins

• Dreyer shows up with some new evidence: Frank had an antipsychotic drug in his system
• Bloch suggests someone was drugging Frank prior to his death
• Alexandra says that Sofia took that same drug as a child.
• Eddie and Harry try to goad the judge so they can get him removed from the case.
• The jurors learn that Frank’s lawyer told the police he wanted to change his will.
• We learn that the executor of the will is Hal Cohen, the blackmailer.
• The police suggest that whoever was drugging Frank Avellino might have been trying to get control of his money. Avellino had signed a power of attorney to Cohen and Alexandra.

• The killer, in her POV, admits that she had been poisoning her father. Also that he had been the one who covered up the evidence of the bite mark on Jane. And that she murdered Heather, his second wife.
• The killer is angry that her father let her be abused and then sent her to boarding school. She killed him to punish him and intends to frame her sister.

Kate is concerned

• Kate thinks her client having power of attorney could make her look guilty.
• But Bloch, her investigator, found new information
• Bloch was looking into pharmacies that might have prescribed the drug given to Frank and found that a pharmacist and cashier were murdered
• In addition, Bloch says a person who resembles the killer, dressed in black leather with a black helmet, has been following Kate
• Then Bloch and Kate witness a man being killed by someone on a motorcycle wearing all black: Hal Cohen

Eddie discusses the case with Harry and then Kate

• Their best theory is that Frank figured out who was being drugged, planned to cut the poisoner out of his will, and ended up dead.
• Eddie watches the videos that he, Harry, and Harper took at Avellino’s townhouse He’s convinced that there’s something incriminating there.
• In a funny Easter egg, Kate is at Bloch’s house and sees a copy of Twisted by J. T. LeBeau (a book from the book, Twisted, that Bloch appears in)
• Kate sends Harry the CCTV video of the pharmacy robbery.
• They meet and she says that the person who killed Hal looks just like the person who targeted the pharmacist.
• They discuss the fact that Mike Modine is probably dead as well.
• Eddie is convinced there’s some piece of evidence that will reveal which sister is guilty
• But Eddie says that if Sofia is guilty, he’ll sink the case. He also agrees to help Kate with Levy’s lawsuit against her.
• Then Eddie shows Kate the weird business card from Levy’s wallet

Back to the trial

• The hair analysis expert says one of Sofia’s hairs was found in Frank’s wounds, but Eddie tears his testimony apart
• The bite mark expert says Alexandra bit her father, but Kate also neutralizes him.
• Kate and Eddie learn that Hal gave the prosecution Frank’s journal
• A handwriting expert testifies that Frank wrote the journal
• The journal says that Frank discovered Sofia poisoned him.
• Kate, Bloch, Harry and Eddie all meet to discuss the fact that Alexandra must have fabricated the journal
• Eddie proves that many of the events in the journal never happened

The jury decides

• The jury finds Alexandra guilty
• Bloch shows up at Eddie’s office. She asks him why Harper was killed. The killer eliminated anyone who could expose them, so what did Harper find?
• Harry and Bloch go back to Avellino townhouse.
• Just as Bloch figures out why Harper died, someone enters the apartment.
• Eddie goes to talk to a friend of Jimmy’s, a man who worked at the restaurant where Frank ate breakfast. He admits someone paid him to put “medicine” in Frank’s eggs.

The final twist

• Eddie visits Sofia at the Tribeca house, which she has inherited. Alexandra is awaiting sentencing.
• And Eddie tells Sofia that her father’s killer left a witness alive: the cook
• Also, Sofia lied in her 911 call about being able to see her sister in the master bathroom, which isn’t possible.
• The police (Soames and Tyler) show up to arrest Sofia
• Sofia says she can’t be re-tried for her father’s murder, as that would be double jeopardy
• But the DA could charge Sofia for Harper’s murder
• And Eddie has just planted Harper’s necklace in her pocket
• Sofia shoots Soames. She forged the diary (with deliberate mistakes) and made sure Hal found it.
• Sofia intends to kill Harry, but Bloch shows up and shoots Sofia.
• Alexandra is freed
• Kate uses the business card, which has a USB with pervy pictures Levy took of Kate and other employees and uploaded to a subscription internet site, to get him to drop the suit.
• The firm tries to bribe Kate with $2 million to keep quiet, but she refuses. And sues the firm on behalf of the other women.
• Kate and Eddie form a new law firm together (and take Bloch with them!)

Did you predict the ending of Fifty Fifty?

I began to suspect that Eddie’s client had to be the guilty one, so he could get up to his usual shenanigans.