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FLESH AND BONES by Paul Levine

FLESH AND BONES

by Paul Levine

Pub Date: Jan. 1st, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-14305-9
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Not even a lawyer as light on his feet as Jake Lassiter can find much wiggle room when he himself was one of the dozens of witnesses who watched his client, model Chrissy Bernhardt, walk up to her father in a crowded bar and shoot him three times, sending him spiraling into a fatal heart attack. And things just get worse when Chrissy's psychiatrist, obliging Dr. Lawrence Schein, hands Jake solid-gold evidence of Chrissy's childhood abuse by Harry Bernhardt—something Schein claims is a perfect defense, though it's nothing more or less, to Jake's disillusioned eyes, than the perfect motive for premeditated murder. With no hope of winning acquittal for a client who tells him she wanted to hurt the old man as badly as he'd hurt her and who cheerfully disclaims the slightest sign of remorse, Jake's only prayer is to go for manslaughter. But armed with all those tapes of Dr. Schein's (including the prizewinner, in which Chrissy tells him she's just bought the gun she's going to shoot her father with), who could doubt the premeditation the prosecution alleges—unless of course it's Jake himself, who's broken his usual rule against sleeping with his clients in favor of the deeper rule that draws him to every guilty-looking dame in Miami? Jake just never learns about women—luckily for his fans, who'll find this impossible case, his seventh (Fool Me Twice, 1995, etc.), more tightly wound than any since his debut in To Speak for the Dead (1990).