This is book 2 of the "Ed Eagle" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

Ed Eagle wakes up on his 50th birthday to find his wife gone. Turns out she's liquidated his brokerage accounts and cleaned a million out of his cash accounts, too, but he manages to at least stop the brokerage accounts from trasnferring offshore. (He wakes up hours late, and attributes it to his wife putting Ambien in his wine, but as I understand Ambien that's not how it works, it gets you to sleep, but is eliminated from the body fairly quickly.)

The book then spends its time with his wife staying neatly a step ahead, and yet being an unfocused whiny-pants with no discipline when she's on-screen.

Ed's not too badly off though, he meets his next (and permanent) wife a few days later. Takes them another whole day to hop into bed, even!

Ends with a nice bit of poetic justice, they safely shepherd the ex-wife back into the US as promised—right into the arms of the cops who are going to arrest her for murder, and with the gun in her purse.

The casualness about carrying illegally in California, and in Mexico, and across internation borders, is insane, incidentally, as is most of the choice of weapons. And...was this the one with the "soft leather" holster for a Glock? Can't remember now, but I've never seen a serious holster, especially a serious belt holster, where soft was a relevant term for the material it's made of (hence the popularity of Kydex, for example).

Ah, and the "short straw" thing that gives the book its title. Ed gets tapped to defend a man accused of murdering his wife and children. The police don't listen to his story and don't investigate at all, since they assume he's lying, so Ed easily gets him off. In an amusing twist, late evidence suggests possibly he's really guilty after all, and Ed managed to miss a hole in his alibi. Well, as a defense lawyer, he has to expect that to happen now and then.