Sheer Gall

There's a lot of bad blood around and not all of it on the slaughterhouse floor when St. Louis trial attorney Rachel Gold wades into the rough and tumble world of kinky sex, meatpacking and high-priced attorneys in her fifth adventure (after Due Diligence). Personal-injury lawyer Sally Wade hires Gold to sue her almost ex-husband, Neville McBride, for assault, offering her black eye and bruises as evidence. A week later, Wade is found dead in a pose identical to one in a pornographic photograph discovered in McBride's apartment; McBride's only alibi is a mystery lover who failed to show up that night. But Gold is persuaded by McBride's defense lawyer, Jonathan Wolf, despite his abrasive style, that the woman who hired her could have been an impostor. Digging through Wade's records, Gold finds a passport for brief trips to Hong Kong, a stash of bonds and stocks, a list of people and payments not on her client list and a receipt for some photographs. Inspired by her martial arts class, Gold confronts two of Wade's chasers, i.e., men and women who cruise the highway for victims who might be potential clients, survives two death threats and gets a chilling look at what goes on inside a modern slaughterhouse. With the assistance of her secretary, Jacki Brand, in the fifth month of turning his linebacker body into something feminine, and law professor Benny Goldberg, who thinks unrelenting verbal sexual assault is funny, Gold digs deep into the surprising market for animal byproducts in an intricate, suspenseful story. (Oct.)