Blood on Their Hands: Weaving a Tangled Web

A racist attorney faces a crisis of conscience when reluctantly defending a black man brutally beaten by police and charged with resisting arrest.


Hiram Garbuncle is a veteran criminal defense attorney—as well as a racist, miserly alcoholic. His life revolves around hoarding money, following sports, pursuing sex, drinking—and the prideful practice of law.


Alec Monceau is a black man working to support his daughter’s family in Trinidad. It is 2008, and his car carries an Obama bumper sticker. This political advertisement leads to a superfluous traffic stop and a brutal beating by police.


It goes against Garbuncle’s grain to defend a black man from a charge of violently resisting arrest, but he is so confident of winning that he is negligent in the jury selection, and a mistrial occurs. He then discovers incriminating evidence on the two cops, and his new challenge becomes how to keep himself and his client alive pending a new trial.


Meet Bob Brink

Bob Brink is a journalist who worked with several large newspaper organizations and a group of magazines. His byline has been on thousands of news stories, features, and entertainment reviews.
He now is embarked on authoring books. His newest book, the legal thriller Blood on Their Hands, follows Murder in Palm Beach: The Homicide That Never Died, a roman à clef about a real, sensational 1976 murder that made headlines for 15 years, and recently made news again with a new development in the case. The book became an Amazon best seller.
His other books are: Breaking Out, a coming-of-age novel, The Way We Were: Short Stories and Tall Tales, and A Tale of Two Continents, a ghost-written memoir. He is working on a book of creative nonfiction about a woman who led an incredible life of crime.
Brink has won numerous writing accolades and several awards, including three for Palm Beach Illustrated, which won the Best Written Magazine award from the Florida Magazine Association after he became copy chief and writer.
Besides dabbling in short-story writing over the years, Brink immersed himself in learning to play the clarinet and tenor saxophone. He performed many years with an estimable, 65-piece community symphonic band, and played a few professional big band gigs.
A product of Michigan and Iowa, Brink has a bachelor’s degree in English and German from Drake University in Des Moines and completed graduate journalism studies at the University of Iowa.