FALSE WITNESS

A satisfying, intelligent legal procedural—a rarity in these days of bed-hopping, bullet-dodging barristers—featuring down-to-earth personalities grappling with a paradox of law. The second episode in the traumatic legal career of Linda Chastain (Presumption of Guilt, not reviewed) begins with a standard woman-in-peril premise, but clings more tightly to realistic procedures and believable plotting, with a few puns and lawyer jokes tossed in. Having left her high-powered white-shoe firm, Chastain is trying to bury her grief for a dead lover by toiling in shabby offices as an Atlanta Assistant District Attorney when, on the old-money side of town, Christine Stanley is gunned down in her palatial new mansion while her children are watching TV in the next room. Stanley’s husband, James, a stuffy financial planner who looks bad in good clothes, has been pilfering the trust accounts of his wife and children. Christine’s neurotic sister, Lynette Connell, suspects James of pulling the trigger, but James has an alibi, backed up by an airline ticket and a hotel bill. Laura impulsively checks out airline schedules and finds that the plane James took was delayed past the time the hotel bill says he checked in. It turns out that another man named James Stanley was in the hotel. But before that Stanley (called Jim) will answer questions, his tenacious lawyer demands full immunity. After learning that James paid Jim $5,000 to check into the hotel in his absence, Chastain discovers that James’s good buddy Jesse Dupree sold James an antique Nazi pistol that could have fired the bullet that killed Christine. And that’s only the beginning of Chastain’s realization that the relationship between James and Jim is a lot more complicated than she first surmised. Accomplished storytelling, tricky courtroom maneuvers, a few whiffs of romance, and refreshingly low-key plotting that sags only in the convenient climactic shootout.