Her Deadly Game, by Robert Dugoni, is apparently the first in a series of courtroom novels featuring Keera Duggan, a criminal defense attorney in Seattle. Duggan was formerly an up and coming prosecutor, but an ill-advised relationship with Miller Ambrose, her boss, led to an early and painful exit from that career. Now, she’s back at her father’s law firm, in which one of her sisters is managing partner and the other is the firm’s secretary.
Duggan’s father, an aging alcoholic, was once seen as the finest and most pugnacious criminal attorneys in Seattle. His drinking, however, has caused his reputation to suffer and his firm to flounder. Dugoni showcases his talents as a writer by presenting us with a portrait of an alcoholic family in all its miserable glory. We have the long-suffering, enabling wife. We have the resentful, excuse-making children, and so forth. It’s painful, but accurate. The family provides an emotional backbone to the story.
Meanwhile, a very wealthy self-made investment advisor named Vince LaRussa returns home after speaking at a charity event and finds his wife dead from a gunshot wound in their kitchen. He calls the police, who arrive and immediately suspect that LaRussa has murdered his wife. He has an alibi, but it doesn’t jibe with the time of death. His wife had been paralyzed in a horse-riding accident a year before, so it’s possible she killed herself, but more likely that Vince did it—wanting to rid himself of the burden of caring for an increasingly depressed and difficult wife.
Vince calls Keera and asks her to defend him. She takes the case, and finds herself confronting Ambrose, her old lover, who will be prosecuting Vince. Ambrose plays to win, and in this case, winning will also have the added bonus of humiliating his ex-lover. Keera is determined not to let this happen, and the bitter feelings about the romance that derailed her career is a strong motivator for her to do her utmost to defend Vince.
Not that it will be so easy. The case against him is at once thin and seemingly airtight. No one saw him shoot his wife. There’s no physical evidence to prove that he did it, but there’s also no other good explanation for how she got shot. Further damning evidence arises as we learn that his wife was visited by an attorney who reviewed her prenuptial agreement, and a close friend who may have been having an affair with Vince.
Keera agrees to a speedy trial and finds herself going to court with, as Clemenza might have put it, her d#$k in her hand. She’s got nothing, but the jury’s been sworn in, and she has to sit through one terrible witness after another making it seem like her client is going away for life.
In the meantime, Keera starts to get strange messages about her client from an anonymous source. Vince is not all that he seems. The good guy, self-made image is masking something darker… but what? Keera needs to find out, because she think it could help prove that other forces are at work framing him for murder. She better hurry up!
Dugoni knows what he is doing. He’s an experienced, highly successful novelist. There’s a good story here, though to me it felt a bit flat in the telling. I also felt some frustration, though perhaps that’s the point. Like, I’m no lawyer, but to rush into trial with no evidence in hand seems like a big mistake. But, that’s just me. If you like courtroom procedurals, you might enjoy Her Deadly Game.