Clean Hands by Patrick Hoffman (2020)

 Elizabeth Carlyle sat at her desk and considered the calls she could make.  For starters she could try Edwin Kerins, the most reasonable of Calcott Corporation's in-house counsel.  She'd explain to him that one of her junior associates had taken a copy of the documents out of the office. He had them on his phone, she'd say.  Yes, the phone was stolen.

--Patrick Hoffman. Clean Hands (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020)

I do admit to reading a fair amount of genre books, so-called "thrillers" that usually aren't very thrilling (which is okay, since I don't particularly care for cheap thrills) though they might (and sometimes do) shed interesting light on human behavior.  Clean Hands is well-written and very modern in a way, with its Russian mobsters, cell phones, corporate lawyers and shadowy government conspiracies.  The two major characters are lawyer Elizabeth Carlyle and "fixer" Valencia Walker, whose attempts to find missing documents in a very important case take them all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, where surveillance cameras are everywhere and where people can be as carefully traced as the criminals in the tv drama "24."  Things move along so quickly, violently and illegally, that there is little time for Carlyle and Walker to emerge as characters; they are more like chess players with their associates and subordinates as the pieces to be moved around the city and Clean Hands, rather like The Brothers Karamazov, is a series of shaggy dog stories that never ends.