In the ’80s, Jack Defalco, an ambitious young District Attorney, determines to win his first California death penalty case…even if it means colluding with a judge to illegally stack the jury. Twenty years later, working with his wife, Paige, in their small Montana law firm, the past returns to haunt them. The man whose death sentence Jack engineered faces execution. If Jack keeps silent, his reputation and livelihood remain secure, but a wrongly convicted man dies. If Jack admits guilt, both he and Paige face disbarment, financial ruin, and public shame. Yet neither lawyer anticipates the chain reaction of mayhem and murder that results from Jack’s confession.
Murder dogs Jack and Paige Defalco from their days as California prosecutors to their newfound careers as Montana defense attorneys. Never mind that they’ve uprooted their kids, caravanned 2,000 miles to the hinterlands of Kootenai County, kissed goodbye to their fat salaries, or vowed to avoid homicide. At Deer Lodge State Prison in 1999, murder sits before Paige in the guise of a skeletal, bloody-lipped, broken-nosed teenager who grins out one side of his mouth as he stares at her through a swollen eye. Evidently his fellow criminals brook no mercy for a convicted killer, regardless of his age or feeble intelligence. This kid’s parents have no money and the local legal eagles have warned Paige to let the conviction stand … or else. Yet that threat, a gauntlet thrown down, fuels her addiction to criminal law. It makes her flip the bird at those in authority and go to trial anyway. So, as she returns the kid’s stare, her nod conveys her agreement to defend mentally disabled Ben Stagg. Is it coincidence that soon thereafter anonymous callers threaten her? That the local media excoriates her? That the State Bar investigates both Defalcos? Is Paige crazy to rat out the corrupt criminal justice system to the ACLU and the Montana Supreme Court? Is she foolhardy to challenge the powerful judges, lawyers, and cops who comprise the Courthouse Cowboys? And with the discovery that Ben Stagg suffers from Klinefelter’s syndrome, a common but rarely diagnosed genetic disorder, will a jury acquit him of murder when presented with a never-before-used insanity defense? This legal thriller rocks the reader with suspense, gallows humor, and a finale filled with redemption.
