Naked Justice
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4.3 • 10 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A lawyer must defend a mayor accused of murdering his family: "Bernhardt again proves himself master of the courtroom drama" (Library Journal).
With his winning smile, acting experience, and history as one of the best quarterbacks Oklahoma University has ever seen, Wally Barrett had no trouble becoming Tulsa's first black mayor. But this perfect politician has a dark side, too. One afternoon at an ice cream parlor, a dozen people watch as he nearly hits his wife during an argument about their children. That same night, a neighbor calls the police after hearing screams from inside the mayor's house. The patrolman discovers the first lady and her children murdered, and the mayor nowhere to be found.
Barrett is captured after a high-speed chase, insensible and covered in blood. The only person willing to defend him is Ben Kincaid, a struggling defense lawyer with a history of winning impossible cases. But when the national media descends on Tulsa, Kincaid will have to do something he's never done before, and oversee an increasingly wild three-ring circus.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wallace Barrett is a former star college quarterback with an acting background who is now the first black mayor of Tulsa, Okla. In the prologue of Bernhardt's sixth Ben Kincaid novel (after Cruel Justice), the Barrett family visits the local Baskin-Robbins; a few hours later, everyone except Wallace is dead, and Wallace is the obvious suspect. Caroline appears to have been the classic abused wife, while the couple's two young daughters seem to have been caught up in a violent marital feud. As Wallace's attorney, Ben is forced to grapple with some very familiar snags in the case: there is a nationally televised highway chase, a contaminated crime scene, a bloody shoe print and a jury selection fraught with questions of racial bias. Bernhardt tries to make the story his own with a final plot twist based on an unknown piece of information about a vasectomy and a pregnancy. He also tries to invest the novel with some freshness by way of two subplots. One deals with Ben's single parenting of his young nephew during his sister's apparent disappearance; the other concerns a myasterious stalker who plagues Ben via letter bombs, a car chase and e-mail (there's little surprise, however, when the stalker's identity is revealed). At the end of the novel, Ben appears to abandon the law, but this intriguing turn toward character and away from the headlines comes far too late to redeem this legal thriller from its too obvious echoes of an all too familiar trial. Author tour.
