IN HER DEFENSE

A burned-out attorney, a beguilingly suspicious client, an impossible case—looks like it’s time for another battle-of-the-

century legal thriller. The best news Francis O’Connell’s had since he left his wife Moira and his son Brendan is the visit from socialite Ashley Bronson, under arrest for shooting former Agriculture Secretary Raymond Garvey, who liked Frank’s looks when she saw him handling a nothingburger defendant in the next cell. The worst news he’s had is Ashley’s response to his request for information: “I killed him.” Convinced that old family friend Garvey had hounded her father to suicide, she let herself into his D.C. apartment with her own key and plugged him. The cops don’t have her confession, of course, but they do have her prints on the murder weapon and an eyewitness who puts her at the scene minutes after the shooting. But they don’t have Frank, who walked away from his beloved father-in-law’s firm and from his lovely, loving wife because he preferred fighting for things to getting them handed to him. (Frank is given a psychiatrist to allow him to make this last point clear for readers new to courtroom drama.) They don’t have Frank’s can-do team of investigators, who could have held off the invasion of Wake Island. And they don’t have the beauteous Ashley, who, as far as the rapidly smitten Frank is concerned, had every moral right to shoot her father’s old friend—especially given the murky, preposterous, decades-old conspiracy they both turn out to have been involved in. The ensuing battle is more notable for Frank’s surprising sweetness than for novelty or surprise; even the rabbits Frank pulls out of his hat seem to emerge in slow motion. If he’s not in the same class as Richard North Patterson or Steve Martini, though (don’t even think about Scott Turow), Horn’s debut places him above Gallatin Warfield and up near Jay Brandon in the crowded field of legal intrigue. (First printing

of 100,000; Literary Guild selection; $150,000 ad/promo)