SWORN TO DEFEND

Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for Cass Jameson to go to bat for Keith Jernigan after all. Now that she’s won him a new trial for robbery on the grounds of a tainted identification, he’s grateful, all right’so grateful that he’s been taking her to dinner, sending her flowers and notes, phoning her at all hours, and refusing to take no for an answer. Even worse, a look into Keith’s past suggests that stalking isn’t a new hobby of his, as the former girlfriend whose face he disfigured with acid can attest. Keith would clearly be enough trouble to monopolize Cass’s whole caseload, if it weren’t for Nellis Cartwright, Cass’s photographer tenant, who’s intent on dragging Cass into the middle of a divorce that’s already left Nellis’s last attorney whimpering, and her vindictive ex Grant Eddington, a drama critic whose pen is the least mighty of his weapons, out for blood. Soon after Eddington warns Cass that people who cross him end up sorry, her practice begins to fall apart in a perfect hail of departed secretaries, bogus bills, forged messages asking favors of judges, and actionable grabs for trusteeships. Looks like Keith’s not the only one Cass, now turned “Job with a law degree,” needs protection from—though even the sharpest readers will be hard-pressed to identify her real tormentor before she ends up in Bellevue. Far more modestly focused than Cass’s ambitious last, Troubled Waters (1997), but well-nigh perfect of its kind.