PRIDE V. PREJUDICE

Bookseller Claire Malloy (Murder as a Second Language, 2013, etc.) gets pissed off at a local prosecutor.

After getting bounced from a jury after a voir dire she thought had not enough voir and too much dire, Claire does what any self-respecting, educated adult would do: goes on a rampage against Prosecuting Attorney Edwin Wessell, hoping to ruin his case against Sarah Swift, who’s accused of killing her husband, John “Tuck” Cunningham. With no reason to think Sarah didn’t in fact kill Tuck, Claire has her work cut out for her. Sarah trumpeted her frustration with Tuck to anyone who’d listen. She has no alibi, and her explanation—that she somehow slept through the shotgun blast that killed her spouse and simply found his body when she awoke and went to the barn on their organic blueberry farm the next morning—sounds absurd even to Claire. Sarah’s court-appointed lawyer, Evan Toffle, strikes her as someone who “lives in his parents’ basement and has yet to lose his virginity.” And the only witness who offers any alternative explanation for Tuck’s demise is Billy, 4-year-old grandson of fellow organic blueberry farmers William and Junie Lund, who insists that on the night in question, Tuck went to the barn to escape the zombies cavorting in a nearby field. Determined to make a fool of Wessell anyway, Claire persists until a figure from Sarah and Tuck’s past casts a new, more sinister light on his death.

Even a dreamboat husband and a dream house don’t seem to satisfy Claire, whose sulky sense of amour-propre makes her teenage daughter, Caron, seem mature.