...Until Proven Innocent: Peter Sharp Legal Mystery #5

This book won the Dan Poynter 2011 First-place GOLD Global eBook Award in the Fiction/Mystery category.

An L.A.P.D. detective named Tony is attorney Peter Sharp's dock neighbor, and aside from being a racist cop on suspension while several incidents of alleged police brutality he's been accused of are being investigated, he seems like pretty nice guy.

Like other boat owners on the dock, Peter avoids eye contact with Tony... whose only friend in the marina appears to be Peter's 12-year old legal ward Suzi, an adorable Chinese computer genius.

She spends time on Tony's boat and enjoys his version of baby-sitting, which entails teaching her the fine art of re-loading the shells for his huge 50-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, a $1,400 piece of hand-held artillery that's the most powerful production handgun in the world and would undoubtedly make even Dirty Harry think twice about going up against it.

Suzi isn't allowed to handle this 15-inch long monster that weighs almost 7 pounds loaded, but she is rapidly becoming a ballistic expert in the re-loading field and when Tony is arrested for suspicion of first-degree murder merely because he was found standing over the body of a Black man who Tony was seen arguing with, Suzi convinces Peter to become the defense lawyer.

When the bullet that killed the victim is determined to have been fired by Tony's gun, the case takes another turn for the worse, and if you're at all interested in law, murder, police procedure and/or ballistics, you'll enjoy reading this book and seeing if you can beat Suzi in a race to find out if Tony is innocent - and if he's not - who the real guilty party is.