The Guilty Plea

A "smart and spellbinding" legal thriller "puts you right in the . . . lives of lawyers caught up in a high-stakes murder trial" (Douglas Preston, New York Times–bestselling coauthor of The Monster of Florence and Gideon's Sword).

On the morning his high-profile divorce trial is set to begin, Terrance Wyler, the youngest son of Toronto's Wyler Food dynasty, is found stabbed to death in the kitchen of his luxurious home. Detective Ari Greene arrives minutes before the press and finds Wyler's four-year-old son asleep upstairs. Hours later, when Wyler's wife, Samantha, shows up at her lawyer's office with a bloody knife wrapped in a towel, the case looks like a straightforward guilty plea.


Instead, an open-and-shut case becomes a complex murder trial, full of spite and uncertainty. There's April Goodling, the Hollywood starlet with whom Terrance had a well-publicized dalliance, and Brandon Legacy, the teenage neighbor who was with Samantha the night of the murder. After a series of devastating cross-examinations, there's no telling where the jury's sympathies will lie.


As in his debut Old City Hall, Rotenberg's gift for twists and turns is always astonishing, but his true star remains the courtroom: the tension, disclosures, and machinations that drive this trial straight to its unpredictable verdict.

Praise for Robert Rotenberg

"A few lawyers are really expert in managing cases—especially criminal cases—in the courtroom. A small percentage of these are very good at making trials come alive. Robert Rotenberg is one of the few, along with Scott Turow, David Baldacci, and John Lescroart. The Guilty Plea is a crackling good read." —F. Lee Bailey


"Robert Rotenberg does for Toronto what Ian Rankin does for Edinburgh." —Jeffery Deaver, author of Edge