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udge Lara Sanderstone, young for the bench at thirty-eight, is a brilliant and brave woman whose judicial career suddenly takes second place to her hunt for the savage murderer of her younger sister and her brother-in-law. In the aftermath of the hideous crime, Lara is left with the victims' brutalized teenage son, Josh, on her hands, and faced with the knowledge of the degradation that has consumed the sister she loved so much. Even more pressing, she herself is being stalked by a killer whose terrifying attacks leave no clue as to identity or motive.

There is no safe haven for Lara - not in the Orange County, California, courtroom where an agonizing case of child abuse and assault is putting the law on trial and the legal system through the wringer; not in the condo where is hiding with the troubled Josh, whom she cannot abandon yet cannot fully trust; not in the arms of a high-powered lawyer who offers her sex without love in return for the comfort of his companionship. She must seek help from a tough homicide detective, to whom she is compellingly drawn, and from a computer genius crippled in body yet strong in spirit. Her life under a sinister sentence of death, her job hanging by an unraveling thread, she must search the corridors of power to uncover a sexual underground turned into a breeding ground for murder. And finally, what she discovers is as shattering to her faith and trust as it is fatally threating to her and those she loves.

Beautifully and intricately crafted in plot, people with complex, fully realized characters, compelling in its legal authenticity and vivid rendering of Southern California lifestyles, Interest Of Justice is a riveting and emotion-packed story of suspense, murder, love, and - in the midst of it all - hope. Gripping the reader from its opening sentence to its unforgettable climax, this masterful novel is not to be missed.

First two pages of Interest of Justice

udge Lara Sanderstone had a ritual. When she was pondering a complex legal matter or was about to make a judicial ruling, she would spin her high-backed leather chair toward the American flag on the left side of her mahogany desk. It seemed to give her inspiration. As for the California flag right next to it, well, she didn’t put much stock in its ability to inspire her - or anyone else, for that matter, although she certainly wouldn’t voice this opinion publicly. Many of the judges didn’t have flags in their chambers. She had inherited the flags, the furniture, her chambers, even her secretary from the judge she had replaced when she was appointed to the superior court bench two years prior after eleven years as a prosecutor. The weekend before her swearing-in ceremony, she had driven to the courthouse in her jeans and lovingly sanded down and refinished the marred surface of the once magnificent desk. There wasn’t much she could do about the chair, however.

The judge she had replaced was a heavy man, and the innersprings had collapsed with his weight. They had promised her a new chair, but it had never appeared. It was like sitting in a bucket. She glanced at the clock. It was almost time to return to the courtroom. The matter on the afternoon calendar was a pretrial motion. These were generally routine and uneventful, carried out in an almost empty courtroom. But unfortunately, this particular motion could destroy the people’s case completely, and it had carried over to a second day. The motion should have been represented by the public defender, a man sympathetic to the prosecution and buried in cases. Now the case had been taken over by Benjamin England, a Rhodes scholar, a man established enough to devote himself full-time to this case and none other.

The case involved the rape and murder of twenty-year-old Jessica Van Horn. She had left her home in Mission Viejo after a weekend visit en route to the UCLA campus in her 1989 Toyota Camry. The car was later found abandoned alongside the freeway with a flat tire. An exhaustive two-month search for the pretty blonde had culminated in tragedy. Her defiled and decomposed body had been found in a field near Oceanside, about forty miles from where her car was discovered. All those involved had hoped against reason that she was still alive. By the time the body was discovered, the officers, reporters, the entire community, had Jessica’s image firmly implanted in their minds: The curly blond hair, the shy smile, the big blue eyes, even the white blouse trimmed in lace that she was wearing in the thousands and thousands of flyers they had distributed. Judge Sanderstone was no longer facing the flag. She had her chair turned to the right side of her desk, where she had a large framed portrait of her great-grandfather, a tribal chief of the Cherokee nation. She took in the proud posture, the sculpted cheekbones, the penetrating eyes, the wisdom. This was where her eyes rested when she was looking for strength.

© 1996 Penguin USA

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