FINAL JUDGMENT

A fourth case lends further support for Los Angeles defense attorney Samantha Brinkman’s sage contention that “everyone looks like a killer to me.”

Niko Ferrell, Sam’s current lover, is a world-renowned martial arts expert who could afford to drop the odd million on a bad investment. But his mother, Sophia Ferrell, is wiped out by the collapse of Gold Strike, LLC, an investment firm he’d urged her to put her life savings into. The news fells Sophia with a second stroke, and Niko goes looking for answers from his broker, Bryan Posner, and Bryan’s partner, Tanner Handel. Predictably, each of them blames the other for the catastrophic cryptocurrency investment that sent Gold Strike and everyone who invested in it spiraling downward. The more closely Niko and Sam examine the case, the more it looks like a deliberate scam. Tanner’s accusations against his partner seem to gain the edge when Bryan’s found dead in his bathtub, but his death is no suicide: He’s died of internal decapitation, a rarely occurring condition most closely associated with exactly the sort of martial arts Niko has long since mastered. Can Sam (Snap Judgment, 2017, etc.) safely assume that the man she loves is innocent? Tanner’s disappearance makes Niko’s position even more perilous, and the investigation Sam launches with Alex Medrano, her in-house private eye, bogs down in a series of conversations with defrauded investors, each of whom adds little or nothing to what they already know—until Tanner’s sometime companion Angelina Poranova provides, not new evidence, but something even hotter: a request that they look into the abduction and rape of her kid sister, Eliza, as she left one of Angelina’s world-class parties. This mystery adds some much-needed oomph to the flagging Gold Strike inquiries, especially once it entangles another man with close ties to Sam, and Clark succeeds in knitting the two cases together in a compelling though morally questionable way. The closing pages find the franchise heroine waiting with bated breath to learn whether she’s been successful in compounding a felony.

Vigilante justice runs rings around the system the heroine allegedly represents.