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A Courtroom Mystery

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Public defender Beatriz Quintero is handed a murder case with twenty-one days left before trial. Her client is twenty-year-old Wyatt Beckett, a night janitor accused of killing the owner of the sawmill that keeps the whole county alive. He lied to the police on the first night. He is holding a typed note the State says he forged. And he refuses to give up his right to a quick trial.

Beatriz has a seventy-year-old investigator who cracks sunflower seeds and calls everyone by the wrong title, a law-school intern who quotes every rule he has ever read, and a Portland verdict she has never forgiven herself for. What she does not have is time.

Then the small things begin to talk. A mill clock that has run twelve minutes fast for thirty years. A patch of dry ground in the exact shape of a man, under a night of rain. A seven-minute phone call from a care-home lobby. A note that asks, very politely, to be obliged.

Every answer the jury needs is on the table before it matters. Every witness seems kind. And the closer Beatriz gets to the truth, the more she has to decide what she owes a person who did a terrible thing for a tender reason.

A fair-play legal thriller with sharp cross-examinations, small-town heart and a courtroom climax you will not see coming. A contemporary courtroom mystery.