Former grifter Eddie Flynn returns in Steve Cavanagh’s ninth legal thriller—where 100 Centre Street hustle meets a high-stakes murder trial.
Two Kinds of Stranger | Steve Cavanagh | Atria Books (400 pages)
“I wasn’t so hot on the law.”
Nothing like a lawyer saying the quiet part out loud. And some excellent lawyers don’t stress themselves out with the finer details of case law and procedure. Eddie Flynn is the kind of fictional lawyer who would make a bar disciplinary committee reach for the Model Rules of Professional Conduct yet one who any defendant in serious trouble would hire in about five seconds.
Flynn fits squarely in that gray-area lineage of Mickey Haller and Saul Goodman — and then pushes a little further. The good news is he has a partner who is very good at those irksome legal details.
That self-aware line is delivered matter-of-factly and tells you a great deal about Flynn, the defense lawyer at the center of Steve Cavanagh’ s A former con artist who became a trial attorney, Flynn approaches the courtroom the way a skilled grifter approaches a mark: studying people closely, spotting weaknesses quickly, and knowing exactly when to bend the rules.
And lawyers who don’t play by the rules make for interesting protagonists. Two literary novels I reviewed last year explored similar territory: Jon Hickey’s , following a tribal fixer on a distinctly slippery slope, and Karim Dimechkie’s , featuring a fantastic portrait of a do-gooder lawyer who does not hesitate to wield the levers of power to win for his clients.
This is the ninth Eddie Flynn book; it is my first. (I had no trouble dropping in — though if you want to start at the beginning, the first book is The Defence.) Two Kinds of Stranger is the kind of thriller that earns its excesses. The plot goes to some dramatic places — this is emphatically not a quiet procedural — but Flynn is compelling enough company that you follow him anywhere. The ending is genuinely surprising and satisfying in a way that a lot of thrillers promise and few deliver.
One of the most unexpected strengths of the novel is the setting. For a Belfast-based writer, Steve Cavanagh captures New York with remarkable precision: the geography, the street texture, the feel of the city. That is research and obsession. The courtroom dynamics are accurate in the way only experience makes possible. Before writing fiction, Cavanagh practiced civil rights law in Northern Ireland, winning the largest award of damages for race discrimination in the country’s legal history and arguing landmark cases in sex and disability discrimination. It is not surprising he gets the courtroom details right.
As for why New York rather than Belfast: Cavanagh has said in an interview that setting the series in the UK would have meant navigating the split between solicitors and barristers — effectively two lead characters. (“Also, it’s hard to write an action scene without making it a comedic experience when one your characters is wearing a wig and a gown!”) It is a funny and practical reason, and that same deadpan pragmatism runs through the novel itself.
“If you want to know what’s going on in a courthouse, you have two options. You can get to know the security personnel or, if there’s a coffee shop in the courthouse, get to know the staff who work there.”
The description of the courthouse at 100 Centre Street feels especially vivid. Flynn’s informal intelligence network includes security officers, booking sergeants, and the staff at a tiny cash-only coffee shop tucked in the back of the building. The sign is so old that when the plastic letters fell off and broke, they couldn’t be replaced; someone drew the O in COFFEE with a Sharpie. Cash only, no cards, and you make sure the tip goes in the jar silently (any rattling of dimes earns you a look from the woman behind the counter). Flynn sends donuts to courthouse staff at Easter and food hampers at Christmas.
Cavanagh also incorporates surprisingly current details: the city’s right-to-shelter laws and the HOME-STAT outreach teams (Homeless Outreach and Mobile Engagement Street Action) that conduct daily counts of unhoused residents across Manhattan. These are not simply background texture; they become part of the plot machinery in ways that are inventive and specific.
Asfor the story itself — it is imaginative and ripped from the headlines in the best way. The novel opens with a moment engineered for the age of viral humiliation. Elly Parker, a YouTuber-turned-influencer, discovers her husband’s affair live on camera in front of 132 million viewers. Cavanagh captures the particular horror of watching private devastation turn instantly into public spectacle. When Elly’s husband and his mistress die shortly afterward from poisoning, she becomes the obvious suspect and hires Flynn to defend her against charges of double murder.
At the same time, Flynn is dealing with a second crisis entirely. A calculating killer is stalking his ex-wife and daughter, targeting them as part of a revenge plot against Christine’s new husband, a lawyer the man believes cheated him out of a large inheritance.
The result is a narrative juggling two major threats at once. Flynn is fighting a murder case in court while a dangerous adversary moves closer to his family. There is, quite simply, a lot of plot here — twisty, full of well-placed red herrings, and more surprising than you expect given how much ground it covers. At times I wondered whether the structure might collapse under its own weight. It doesn’t. The ending is truly surprising yet earned; it tracks in the way that good thriller endings should but often don’t.
My inner courthouse watcher did occasionally surface. Trials move very quickly in this book, sometimes astonishingly quickly; though to Cavanagh’s credit the book openly acknowledges that accelerated pace.
What really anchors the novel is Flynn himself. Cavanagh’s protagonist is both cynical and deeply observant about the profession he practices.
“Grifting is not so different from filing lawsuits, persuading juries, or winning more clients. The big difference in the con game: the hours are better.”
Flynn’s con-artist past shapes the way he practices law in ways that go beyond courtroom tactics. He reads people instinctively, understands who has influence and who might be persuaded to part with information.
His law partner Kate functions as the book’s moral counterweight. She knows Flynn crosses lines and has clearly spent years making a complicated peace with that reality. At one point she begins writing down some extremely questionable advice Flynn has given her about keeping their client safe inside Rikers Island. Then she stops, realizing she does not want that guidance written anywhere permanent. It is a small moment but it lands: a quiet acknowledgment of just how far Flynn’s methods can go.
The novel spends time inside the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s facility on Rikers Island, known as Rosie’s. It was opened in the late 1980s with rehabilitative intentions: work programs, art therapy, gardens. Writing an opinion column for the New York Times, Singer’s granddaughter blasted the jail’s conditions, calling them an insult to her grandmother’s lifelong work in criminal justice reform.
Cavanagh knows this and does not look away from what Rosie’s actually is. When Elly is held there awaiting trial, the environment is tense and volatile, with the constant possibility of violence from both inmates and guards.
One caveat: I am not a serial killer novel reader. I picked this up for the defense attorney. That said, the killer’s perspective is unusually well drawn. For a character who could easily have been a stock thriller villain, the interiority he is given is surprisingly nuanced. His grievances and patient calculations make the threat feel far more unsettling than a simple madman on the loose.
Cavanagh balances all of it — the courtroom, the killer, the city — with more control than the plot’s ambitions have any right to expect. I came in skeptical. I finished satisfied; which, in Eddie Flynn’s world, probably counts as a successful con.
The Fine Print: Thanks to NetGalley and Atria Books for the advance copy.
Two Kinds of Stranger | Steve Cavanagh | Atria Books (400 pages)