Face Value: A Rachel Gold Mystery

At the start of Kahn’s engaging ninth mystery featuring lawyer Rachel Gold (after 2013’s The Flinch Factor), a security guard finds the broken body of Sari Bashir, a young attorney at St. Louis’s Warner & Olsen law firm, in an alley. Did the demands of Sari’s job drive her to jump off the top of a 10-story parking garage? Stanley Plotkin, an employee in the Warner & Olsen mail room with Asperger’s syndrome, thinks that Sari was murdered. Stanley, a devoted student of the Facial Action Coding System, which allows one to read emotions from facial expressions, is sure Sari was agitated and upset right before her death, but not depressed or suicidal. Rachel agrees to investigate, and gathers a team to do so. Rachel and company soon uncover details about murky cases, financial improprieties, and not-what-they-seem coworkers. Ample humor and skillful dialogue—about legal, financial, and scientific matters—are a plus, as is the expertly evoked St. Louis locale. (June)