SEEDS OF DOUBT

A sophomore case for dyslexic Denver attorney Jackie Flowers finds her equally outraged and baffled but less personally engaged.

Rachel Boyd has just finished doing 30 years for killing Freddie Gant in Vivian, Colorado, when he was 4 and she was only 12. No sooner is she released and gone to stay with her banker brother Christopher in Denver than another child disappears: Chris’s gardener’s son Benjamin Sparks, 6, who promptly turns up as dead as little Freddie. Things look so bad for Rachel, an ex-con who showed no remorse for her earlier crime or even admitted she’d done it, that Chris insists Jackie defend her and shoves a pot of money at her to get her interest. And she’ll need all the incentive she can get because everyone around her, from her investigator to her next-door neighbors to her ex-lover, attorney Dennis Ross, is agog that she’s agreed to take Rachel in as a houseguest when she’s released on her own recognizance because they all assume Rachel’s guilty. And why shouldn’t they? The postmortem exam shows that Ben was wounded in a pattern eerily similar to Freddie, presumably with a weapon that hasn’t been found for 30 years. Both Lee Simms, the tabloid journalist who rode the earlier case to brief glory, and Trina Maune, Rachel’s grade-school cohort and confidante, who make the trip from Vivian to Denver, and from past to present, ostensibly to help Jackie defend Rachel turn out to have agendas of their own. And of course she has to fight tooth and nail for every inch of pretrial courtroom turf.

Despite her best efforts, Kane doesn’t give her smart, sorely beset heroine anything like the personal stake in this case that she had in her debut (Extreme Indifference, 2003). Instead, Jackie seems intent on building a client base consisting entirely of the most despised people in Colorado.