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The opportunity of a lifetime. Her Kansas City law firm merged with Chicago powerhouse Franklin and Holland, and Emma Davis has left behind the KC law firm and a failed romance to start anew. One of her first assignments comes from a managing partner, something unheard of for new associates. The assignment is simple: Emma merely has to transfer funds from a client's estate to a trust. The client, a long time friend of Louis Brisbane, the partner who gave Emma the assignment, died of an apparent overdose of alcohol and drugs. Oak Graythorne, the deceased, owned a building which a developer is very anxious to purchase. Louis assigns Emma the task of sending letters to the current tenants, offering them escalating sums to vacate. Emma first suspects something fishy when she realizes that Louis is both executor of Oak's estate and in charge of the trust Oak set up to donate his money to charities. Things begin to really unravel when one of the tenants, Lee Herrick, who knew Oak through AA, comes to Emma and tells her that he is positive that Oak's death was neither a suicide nor an accident -- Oak had been in a very upbeat mood of late and was planning to start a new business. Emma agrees with Lee, but the case for murder seems impossible to prove. (The reader knows from the first chapter that Lee is right.) However, Emma becomes suspicious when she sees Louis -- more than once -- in conversation with Tony Corona, a client of Lee with reputed connections to the Mob and a shady reputation for his work in the construction industry. To make life a little more complicated, while walking her friend/neighbor's dog, Emma accidentally encounters Flynn Fielding, one of Chicago's leading architects, with whom she soon begins a romance. Conveniently -- and rather oddly -- her friend has kept a scrapbook about Flynn, since he is on her "wish list" of men to date. The book is well paced and well plotted. When will Louis realize that Emma is on to his and Tony's scheme -- to sell real estate from estates Louis is supervising to his real estate company at below market prices and then resell them for higher prices at great profit? And what will the unscrupulous Louis and Tony do to protect themselves once they realize what Emma has uncovered? Emma does put herself in a couple of "Perils of Pauline" situations that seem de rigeur for female sleuths -- especially amateur ones, situations that are totally foolhardy for an intelligent woman. The only problem with the novel is that the good guys are almost too perfect -- Emma, her boyfriend Flynn, and her zany friend Kathy, and Louis is so smarmy that one wonder how he ever became senior partner...but then, he's a lawyer. However, on the whole, the characters are engaging, and the plot is engrossing.
Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Devine, April 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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