No Defense

The murder case against young widow Lara Jessup appears airtight after her wealthy, much older, and terminally ill husband Vinny is shot on a twisting Oregon mountain road, and legal eagle Barbara Holloway struggles mightily to construct a defense for Lara in the first half of Wilhelm's latest legal thriller. Holloway is certain that the mountain of evidence indicating that Lara shot Vinny and then tried to make it look like a suicide is part of a setup by Harris McReady, an ambitious candidate for the Oregon Supreme Court who was also involved in an earlier ""accident"" in which Vinny's son from a previous marriage was shot. But Holloway travels down a series of dead ends in her efforts to unearth clues in the Oregon desert town where McReady is using his ties with a powerful rancher, Thomas Lynch, to press his case, and a conviction seems imminent as depositions are taken before the trial. The resourceful lawyer hits pay dirt, though, when the final leg of the investigation leads to McReady's gorgeous but damaged wife, who is also Lynch's daughter, and the pace picks up considerably as she dissects her opponent's marriage of convenience and the Lynch family history, revealing a hornet's nest of shady deals and coverups. Wilhelm spends considerable prose developing her quirky cast of characters, using the eerie milieu of the Oregon high desert to set off the oddness of this likable group. The attention to detail slows things up a bit, but once the depositions start, the action turns electric as the story races to an intriguing ending. Her carefully crafted approach to the legal thriller continues to separate Wilhelm from the competition, and those who prefer both style and substance in their courtroom dramas will find this a satisfying read. (Jan.)