The figurehead of a Napa wine empire has lost his youngest son, Alain, in a tragic accident, paving the way for his older son to inherit the entire estate. His daughter, the exquisitely beautiful Claudia, claims to have proof that Alain is still alive. And an old friend of Alain’s is drawing suspicion for his interest in a chunk of the winery’s acreage for a neighboring golf course.
Or so it appears at the opening of Cortez author Chuck Greaves’ new book The Last Heir. The legal mystery, which is set in the tony wine country of Napa Valley, quickly veers into unexpected territory as betrayals and crimes of its characters unfold – leaving its protagonist, attorney Jack MacTaggert, to find his way through a bramble of lies, murder, grapes and manipulation.
Greaves, a former lawyer who grows wine grapes himself in McElmo Canyon, will kick off a western book tour in Durango on Tuesday to mark the book’s release.
The Last Heir is the third installment in Greaves’ Jack MacTaggert legal mystery series. While the first book, Hush Money, took place in the world of champion race-horsing and the second, Green-eyed Lady, was set in the cut-throat realm of political campaigns, The Last Heir finds MacTaggert in the upscale and carefully manicured Napa region, where the scions of a California wine dynasty are battling for control of the business.
Greaves said he likes to put the wily lawyer into scenarios where he doesn’t quite fit in.
“I like the idea of sort of a blue collar kind of guy who in each of the books finds himself in a privileged environment where he is kind of condescended to, but by virtue of his character and his stick-to-it-ness, he triumphs,” Greaves said. “That is sort of the trope that is common in all three.”
In The Last Heir, MacTaggert and his legal team are up against a prominent family with a deep history of distrust, resentment and feuding and a web of lies so thick it’s nearly impossible to cut through to the truth. A father who is loathed by his adult children lives a gilded life despite having little control in the future of the winery. A daughter is discovered to have a romantic relationship with a close family friend and a possible crime on her hands only after she has lured MacTaggert into her bed. And a son and his activist wife may be trying to undercut the family patriarch to get better conditions for the winery’s workers.
MacTaggert is burned several times by his clients as they lie to him, hide their pasts and pull stunning reversals. But the attorney is tenacious, and, through a combination of his wits and his (not always by-the-book) sleuthing, he gets to the bottom of this knotty story.
“The whole first third of the book is Jack being played by the various members of the family,” Greaves said. “I like that idea of Jack being led by the nose and then stabbed in the back. The rest just sort of flowed from there.”
With many intersecting subplots and a fair amount of legal process, it can be tough at times to follow the story. But The Last Heir is fast-paced and humorous, a fun read that proves Greaves knows how to turn a sentence and keep readers guessing.
He is relatively new to the writing world but has started strong thanks to the breakout success of his first MacTaggert novel. (He has had four books published since 2012.)
His personal biography sounds a little like something out of a novel. He grew up in New York, went to law school in Boston, then practiced civil litigation in California for 25 years. In 2006, he had his version of a midlife crisis, he said, when he retired from law at age 50 to pursue a long-held dream of being a novelist. Greaves decamped with his wife to Santa Fe and started to write.
“In the back of my mind, I think it was always something I wanted to do,” he said. “I went about it in a somewhat unusual way. But all’s well that ends well.”
Greaves, who grew up reading a lot of Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes, said the MacTaggert character kind of just came to him. He wanted to make MacTaggert down-to-earth, unflappable and shrewd, he said, and admitted there’s probably a bit of himself in Jack.
Once he had his character, he started to weave together the stories. Greaves uses personal experience, outside research and imagination to craft his mysteries.
“Writing a mystery is unlike any other kind of writing,” he said. “When you plot a mystery, you plot two different books. You have to plot what really happened. And you have to plot how you dole that information out to the readers.”
Writing a mystery is one thing. Breaking into publishing, Greaves discovered, is another. After he wrote Hush Money, he sent query letters to literary agents. In the meantime, he began to write his second book, Hard Twisted, which tells the true-crime story of Lottie Garrett, an orphan who was kidnapped by an ex-con during the Depression.
When he finished that book, three years had passed, and he still had no agent, editor or prospects. So he entered both manuscripts into the 2010 SouthWest Writers Annual Writing Contest in Albuquerque. There, Hush Money won best mystery/thriller novel and Hard Twisted came in second in the best historical novel category. Within two weeks, he said, he had sold both books to publishers.
“So that’s how I got my break,” he said.
In The Last Heir, Greaves, an oenophile himself, weaves his extensive knowledge of both wines and courts into the tale of deception and murder. He also includes a few scenes based on true events, he said. But mostly, the book focuses on MacTaggert’s cunning detective work amid a tangle of lies.
kklingsporn@durangoherald.com
If you go
Cortez author Chuck Greaves will be celebrating the release of his new novel, The Last Heir, with a book launch at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Maria’s Bookshop, 960 Main Ave., 247-1438.
