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VERDICT UNSAFE by Jill McGown

VERDICT UNSAFE

by Jill McGown

Pub Date: June 1st, 1997
ISBN: 0-449-91067-9
Publisher: Ballantine

Two years after the open-and-shut case against Colin Drummond came apart—despite a DNA match on the second of four rapes and a pair of eyewitnesses to the fourth—Drummond is free on a technicality. The new, not-guilty Drummond splits his time between preparing a lawsuit against the coppers who took him in- -he's not assuaged by the fact that two of them have already been tossed off the force for beating him—and harassing Judy Hill, the inspector whose evidence really would've put him away (he confessed a fifth, unreported rape to her in numbing detail and marked her as his sixth victim) if his canny lawyer hadn't gotten it thrown out. On reopening the case, Chief Inspector Lloyd, Judy's boss/lover, finds disturbing new evidence that contradicts Judy's story of the unreported rape. He can't believe she'd lie, but his higher-ups in the Stansfield CID have no such problem. Meantime, Judy herself has started to dig up evidence throwing a much deeper shadow on the ``Malworth Mafia''—the officers who allegedly set Drummond up. As the other victims in this sorry drama struggle to get on with their lives—one victim, a prostitute, has married a savior who's pimping her to the husband of a second victim who can't face sex with his wife anymore, while a third victim has given up and killed herself—the news comes that another victim has been found, raped and murdered. And the killing has only just begun. For once, McGown (A Shred of Evidence, 1996, etc.) has set forth a case as gripping as its people—from the key clue buried in the opening sentence to the dizzying complications still being spun out moments before the final curtain.