Amazon.com Review
If you liked D.W. Buffa's debut legal thriller The Defense, you should love this sequel. It's virtually the same blend of courtroom razzle-dazzle and backstage manipulation, beautifully written, and studded with deep philosophical thoughts. Joe Antonelli, the ace Portland, Oregon, defense attorney who could get even the most guilty of villains off the hook, has been so shattered by the events of the first book that he's retired, sitting in the house he inherited and reading lots of classic literature. Then his best friend, Judge Horace Woolner, arm-twists him into coming back to work--this time as a special prosecutor, investigating the distinct possibility that the city's deputy district attorney hired a man to kill his wife. The case, of course, is fraught with political overtones. And no sooner has Joe done this dirty job than another disturbing case pops up for him to handle: Judge Woolner's wife is charged with shooting a man who might have been her lover.

Buffa, a former professor of political theory and Portland criminal lawyer, is also a world-class writer who knows how to plant vital evidence and then snatch it away or turn it on its head. He also is sly enough to realize that Antonelli might become a bit of a prig if left unchecked, so he drops in the occasional little jest among the deep thoughts from time to time. In an elevator, Joe quotes a line from Thomas Hobbes to Judge Woolner:

"Life is 'a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.'" "Ceaseth," Horace repeated, laughing at the way it sounded. "You have to understand," I said, as the elevator door slid open, "in the seventeenth century everyone talked with a lisp."