BARR NONE

Three attorneys get involved in a dangerous plot involving sex work in this series mystery.

Impellizzeri’s tale centers on Tricia Connors, a starry-eyed young associate at the Manhattan firm of Barr Knoll, run by its charismatic, egotistical founder of the same name. Instead of the great opportunities Barr promised, she finds herself relegated to menial tasks along with her roommates, Cassandra and Ruth. Tricia is taken in hand and given a style makeover by a woman known only as the Times Square Madam, who inhabits the firm’s top-floor office. She has Tricia rope Cassandra and Ruth into an immigration scam in which the trio pretend to be engaged to three of the firm’s foreign clients to help them score visas. Subsequent assignments involve explicitly sexual “client development” tasks; Cassandra and Ruth resist, but Tricia goes along while angling to become the new madam. In a plotline set in a post-Covid present, Barr Knoll associate Carly Jenner stumbles across files pertaining to deaths in a suspicious car crash 10 years earlier. Carly’s colleague Rain Street believes the victims were murdered and prods Carly to investigate; meanwhile, Carly is fighting on behalf of a group of women in a workplace sex-discrimination lawsuit. This second installment of Impellizzeri’s Riversedge Law Club series paints a mordant picture of low-level lawyering with a feminist edge. Her characters are overworked, underpaid, and perpetually exploited and demeaned by creepy patriarchs. The braided subplots feel unfocused and overcomplicated at times, and the story sometimes spins its wheels as Tricia and Carly ruminate on their unhappy lives. Fortunately, Impellizzeri’s prose is shrewd and evocative (“Rain has a way of drawing people out. Like she already knows your secrets. Like you’re just confirming and not confessing”), and the courtroom jousting is lively and well paced: “Barr, you haven’t changed a bit from the days I was working for you and watching you pimp out women as whores to international real estate tycoons,” testifies one implacable witness on the stand.

A legal yarn with an ungainly structure that’s rescued by punchy prose.