MOTION TO DISMISS

In the middle of launching a public offering of ComTech, his graphics chip company, Grady Barrett runs into a streak of rotten luck. His wife Nina, six months pregnant, has been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, which can’t even be treated till after a caesarian. Deirdre Nichols, the beauty salon receptionist he picks up at a bar, accuses him of rape, and he won’t even consider his lawyer Kali O’Brien’s consensual-sex defense. Then suddenly the charge is withdrawn—but only because the complainant is dead, fallen from her balcony window. Or pushed, say the Oakland police, who claim they can place Grady’s Mercedes convertible at the scene, courtesy of a statement by Deirdre’s seven-year-old daughter. Calling on Hal Fisher, a gay investigator she’s worked with before, Kali rolls up her sleeves in preparation for the trial. Once again, though, Grady is adamant about running his own defense. He can’t spend six months to a year away from his sick wife and his little girl while he waits for the case to come to trial; Kali will have to do everything she can to get the charge thrown out at the preliminary hearing, even though nobody’s been able to pull off that trick since Perry Mason. Jacobs is still too lightweight to run with her big sisters in the legal-intrigue genre; there’s nothing of Nancy Taylor Rosenberg’s sense of menace or Lisa Scottoline’s powers of invention on display here. Instead, Kali’s third case (Evidence of Guilt, 1997, etc.) is a whodunit—and the best-turned puzzle of Jacobs’s six novels to date. (Author tour)