Incognito.

• Author: Groot, Lonnie

Incognito

By Terry Lewis

Incognito, written after Terry Lewis left the Tallahassee circuit court bench on which he served for 30 years, is clearly his best work. The general rule that an author writes best about what the author has experienced has been broken.

Far from the courtroom, law offices, and sweaty streets of Florida's capital city, the action (and there is a lot of that!) in Incognito centers around the streets of Philadelphia and New York in revolutionary times when the issue of our future nation's independence from England was being hotly debated on the streets and in the legislative halls.

Lewis departs from the details of today's courtroom life and the contemporary world of lawyers and their professional and personal challenges. He has done very well in the past in achieving the difficult task of making interesting and exciting to his readers depositions, legal strategy sessions, pleading issues, and other routine legal matters that can even bore practitioners of the law. Lewis has done that, by and large, by his clever character creation and development.

Incognito continues to show how Lewis creatively brings strong characters to life, but readers are brought into the colonial world of traitors, patriots, murders, and the high life and low life of the period.

The novel focuses on a threat to the leaders of the incipient independent movement in the midst of war. Will the Founders survive long enough to pass the Declaration of Independence? Will Gen. Washington avoid assassination? We know the historical answers to these questions, but Lewis makes the threats real and present. That was a hard task, but with great research and masterful writing, Lewis pulls it off.

The central character of...