Ultimate Justice

There's justice, and then there's justice in Latt's third legal thriller (Powers of Attorney and Pursuit of Justice). While visiting her dying mother in L.A., deputy district attorney Alexandra Locke hears a death-bed confession from Erica Collins, a fellow hospital patient her mother has befriended. Erica tells Locke that 20 years ago her husband, Dr. George Collins, murdered his best friend, Jeffrey McGrath, and bribed a young DA--Locke's father, Thomas Kendall--to cover it up. Kendall is now an aggressive four-term district attorney in a stiff reelection race. If Locke doesn't investigate, Erica will send her evidence to the press. Reluctantly, Locke begins a probe and discovers that her father found McGrath's death ""accidental"" for lack of other evidence; McGrath's widow, Lorna, married George Collins; and the autopsy and ballistics reports are missing from the original Collins-McGrath case files. When Locke confronts her father privately, he orders her to drop the investigation. She doesn't, and inexorably, she's drawn into a web of McGrath and Collins family secrets. Then police find a stash of drugs in her apartment, and when Locke is arrested, she calls the one defense attorney in town she trusts, Patrick Ross, the college sweetheart she left years ago. Now she must prove she was framed, but if she does, she may bring down her own father. The dark family secrets Locke uncovers (including bribery, incest, rape, suicide and murder) are the foundation on which Latt constructs her competent plot, but one-dimensional characters, and the awkward, unnecessary repetition of facts that the reader already knows, diminish the appeal of a potentially promising thriller that seems, regrettably, to have been written by the numbers. Agent, Anne Sibbald. (Aug.)