The Perfect Alibi: A Novel

Phillip Margolin

Mar 2019 · Robin Lockwood Book 2 · Sold by Minotaur Books

About this eBook

The “master of heart-pounding suspense”—New York Times bestseller Phillip Margolin—returns with a new legal thriller starring Robin Lockwood.

A young woman accuses a prominent local college athlete of rape. Convicted with the help of undisputable DNA evidence, the athlete swears his innocence and threatens both his lawyer and his accuser as he's sent to prison. Not long after, there's another rape and the DNA test shows that the same person committed both rapes—which is seemingly impossible since the man convicted of the first rape was in prison at the time of the second one. Now, the convicted athlete, joined by a new lawyer, is granted a new trial and bail. Shortly thereafter, his original lawyer disappears and his law partner is murdered.

Robin Lockwood is a young lawyer with a prestigious small law firm and a former MMA fighter who helped pay for Yale Law School with her bouts. She is representing the victim of the first rape for her civil lawsuit against her rapist, who is now convinced the rapist is stalking her and trying to intimidate her. At the same time, another client is up on a murder charge—one that should be dismissed as self-defense—but the D.A. trying the case is determined to bring it to trial. Now she has to mastermind two impossible cases, trying to find the hidden truth that links the two of them.

Phillip Margolin, the master of the legal thriller, returns in one of his twistiest, most compelling crime novels yet.

Ratings and reviews

The Perfect Alibi has a great protagonist in Robin Lockwood. She's interesting, tough, and doesn't settle for the easy answer. We start with a rape case that seems pretty cut and dried, but things aren't always exactly as they seem, and given the length of the book, I did expect things to go off the rails. What I didn't expect was for this story to take so many different paths. We have conspiracies, murders, rape, and misconduct all happening in rapid-fire succession and with the number of characters introduced, it all becomes convoluted. Some things do tie in together, but a lot of it is closer to degrees of separation than anything tied together - A guy goes to prison for rape, his lawyer may or may not be tied to a murder, the DA isn't the most ethical and might have reasons to want the lawyer out of the picture, then we have a mysterious bad guy lurking around for completely unrelated reasons. That's just the tip of the iceberg in this one, and the only thing that everything seems to have in common is that Robin is involved with most of it in one way or another. The author does tie everything up in the end, but the middle goes down so many avenues that it's all just more distracting than anything else. The book had the potential to be a great story with the twist in the rape case and a less than likable guy behind bars for the crime, one who may or may not be guilty. As it stands, there is just too much going on and much of it is way over the top. This one could certainly have done with a bit of the less is more adage. The saving grace of the story for me is Robin. I did enjoy reading how she figured things out, and I liked her self-assurance and willingness to go the extra mile.

Very. Well written.

About the author

PHILLIP MARGOLIN has written over twenty novels, most of them New York Times bestsellers, including Gone But Not Forgotten, Lost Lake, and Violent Crimes. In addition to being a novelist, he was a long time criminal defense attorney with decades of trial experience, including a large number of capital cases. Margolin lives in Portland, Oregon.