Ted DiPaulo, a Toronto criminal defense attorney partial to high-profile cases, admits that "nothing would make him happier than running a murder trial he thought he could win." In this rousing courtroom thriller in the tradition of Scott Turow, Ted gets almost everything he loves most.
One sultry August morning, Samantha Wyler unexpectedly becomes Ted's client. On the eve of their divorce trial, Samantha's husband, Terrance, was stabbed to death in his kitchen. Samantha tells Ted that she had been in the house after the stabbing; she also confides that she was angry when she arrived at the house. Samantha had motive and opportunity to kill, but she claims that she didn't murder Terrance.
Given these and other damaging facts, Ted yields to pressure from opposing counsel Jennifer Raglan (whom he trained) and the judge to have his client plead guilty to lesser charges in order to avoid possible conviction of first-degree murder.
Robert Rotenberg, a Toronto trial attorney and author of Old City Hall, brings authority and authenticity to the strategies and negotiations that lead up to such a plea, deftly showing how they can be compromised. With a winningly sardonic style, Rotenberg poses the thorny questions of where justice lies and who ends up pursuing truth.
When Samantha Wyler nixes the guilty plea, her murder trial begins. Ted and Jennifer, old friends and colleagues, have to go head to head in the courtroom. As Ted notes about their shared psychologies, "There are the blues. There is the night. There's darkness. And then there's losing a case." Rotenberg piles on suspense about whether Samantha is a conniving killer or an innocent being strangled by a web of incriminating evidence. --John McFarland