Judgment Calls by Alafair Burke was published in 2003 but it slipped right by me. I don't know how I miss these books. I was subscribing to Publisher's Weekly in those days so it puzzles me that I didn't read a book of this quality, a mystery that has back cover testimonials from Sue Grafton, Michael Connelly, Linda Fairstein, and Lee Child.
Well, I've read it now and I'm ever so glad I happened on it at last. The author, a former assistant district attorney in Portland, Oregon, has written a courtroom drama with a more realistic trial than any other I can recall reading. Which isn't easy to do and still keep your reader from falling asleep.
The story starts out with our heroine, Samantha Kincaid, also a deputy district attorney in Portland, being approached by a couple of detectives who want her to take over a case that one of the big shot attorneys in the office intends to let drift. A 13-year old occasional prostitute with an incipient heroin addiction is kidnapped, badly beaten, raped, and left for dead. She lies at first about the prostitution and heroin habit but eventually admits she was out looking for a "date" to pay for the drug. She is very young, has a stable home, and is not as hardened as many girls on the street.
She is able to make a quick and definite identification of one of the two men who hurt her. She also positively identifies his car. Although it is the wrong color she insists that this is without question the car in which she was attacked.
Kincaid puts the case together, finding a fingerprint of the suspect on the girl's purse, and discovering that the car was repainted and reupholstered two days after the attack. But a series of detailed letters to the Portland newspaper spins the trial into a hot political issue and the police department comes under investigation for this and another, possibly related, case. Kincaid is taken off the case and it's handed over to the attorney who originally showed so little interest in it.
Complicating everything else is the reheating of a relationship between Kincaid and a cop working on the case, a relationship that started in high school and has been on and off, mostly off, since then. Can she trust this guy, or has he leaked information to a witness to get a conviction?
The story is based on the serial murderer, Keith Hunter Jesperson, who killed at least eight women between 1990 and when he was arrested in 1995. Judgment Calls is the first in a series of mysteries featuring Samantha Kincaid.
Alafair Burke is now a professor of law at Hofstra University. She is the daughter of James Lee Burke.