The Flinch Factor: A Rachel Gold Mystery

Both tough-minded and kind, Rachel Gold struggles with two difficult cases in Kahn’s enjoyable eighth mystery featuring the St. Louis attorney (after 2002’s Trophy Widow). First of all, Rachel is representing residents of a comfortable middle-class neighborhood in their hopeless fight to keep a ruthless real-estate developer from bulldozing their homes to build a gated community. Second, she agrees to help the grieving sister of Nick Moran, a contractor she knew whose death the police have written off as a drug overdose. A trial lawyer himself, Kahn handles the legal details briskly. Even better, as the investigations begin to overlap, Rachel’s tense skirmishes with antagonists are balanced with warm interactions with her family and friends—and zany encounters with notoriously eccentric judge Howard Flinch. Rachel may cite Raymond Chandler, but this relaxed, cheerful novel has few traces of noir. (June)