Malice Prepense

Forget about Grisham, Turow and all those other scribbling ex-lawyers. The best writer of legal mysteries working today is Kate Wilhelm of Eugene, Oregon. Her first two books about Barbara Holloway -- The Best Defense and Death Qualified -- were sleeper successes. Holloway is a marvelously dense and thorny character, and her father and legal colleague is equally interesting. "He resolutely denied himself awareness of the time clock ticking away, and while denying it, he tried to remember if she was thirty-nine or forty," Wilhem writes of father Frank thinking about his daughter. "In his head, she was sometimes a very young girl, and then a woman older and wiser than he was; he no longer knew which image was more accurate. He suspected she was both, and then a few others, too."