Martha “Marty” Nickerson, an assistant district attorney on Cape Cod, speaks for victims of crime and their families and sees the system as a means for doing right. The case of Manuel Rodriguez is a prime example. Rodriguez is accused of brutally murdering a college student, a kind young man with a bright future. Marty has worked hard on this case. As the mother of a teenage son, she feels a deep obligation to the murdered boy’s grieving parents. Her case against Rodriguez is so solid that even public defender Harry Madigan, the champion of the Cape’s underdogs, expects a conviction. And, on Memorial Day, a year after the crime, the verdict comes in: guilty as charged. But soon, another body turns up in disturbingly similar circumstances, and Marty begins to question her victory. Did she and her colleagues target the wrong man?
Her supervisor refuses to reopen such a high-profile case. Why should they? The prosecutors played by the rules and won big. But Marty fears that the real killer will strike again. With her career on the line and lives at stake, Marty must rely on her own moral compass, legal savvy, and gut instinct as she matches wits with a twisted killer. The system itself is on trial as Marty tries to serve justice, not merely the law.
Rose Connors received her law degree from Duke University in 1984 and has been a trial attorney for two decades. She is the author of Absolute Certainty, which won the Mary Higgins Clark Award for best first novel. She lives with her family on Cape Cod, where she spends summers commercial shell fishing with her two teenage sons.
Bernadette Dunne has been honored to narrate the work of some of the finest fiction and nonfiction writers of our time, including Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Sandra Day O'Connor. The winner of more than a dozen Earphones Awards and a three-time Audie Award nominee, she has voiced countless bestsellers, including Memoirs of a Geisha, The Devil Wears Prada, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She studied at The Royal National Theater and lives in New York.