FALSE WITNESS

The murder of a skeezy financial adviser sparks questions that aim everywhere you can imagine in Multnomah County, Oregon.

To hear dimwitted Jack Blackburn tell it, Billy Kramer, the chauffeur to Terrance Cogen, asked him to take Billy’s girlfriend, Cindy, home from a bar in Cogen’s Jaguar because Billy was drunk, and when Jack returned to the bar to drop off the Jag, Billy wasn’t there. That’s important because a beer glass found inside Cogen’s home with Jack’s prints links him to what turns out to be a murder scene. The case is assigned to attorney Karen Wyatt, who ever since she was framed for professional misconduct, disbarred, jailed for a year, freed, reinstated, and awarded a hefty settlement has had an eye out for other defendants in the frame. There’s no shortage of alternative suspects. Apart from all the clients Cogen swindled, his fourth wife, Rosemarie, is delighted to be spared the trouble and expense of divorcing him. And Oregon Congressman Thomas Horan, who’d gone missing just before the murder, produces the world’s unlikeliest alibi: He’d been abducted by aliens who kept him in their custody that night. Karen and her investigator, Morris Johnson, the ex-cop who arrested her four years ago, quickly tie Cogen’s misdeeds to Walter Zegda, the sociopathic second-in-command of the gang Lucifer’s Disciples. But they’re forced to tread carefully by the news that the Disciples have a mole in the Multnomah D.A.’s office and a dying message from a Disciple in the know that seems utterly useless in identifying that mole. The final surprise isn’t all that surprising, but readers who’ve been caught up in all those complications won’t mind.

A stand-alone with as much energy as Margolin’s franchise tales of defense attorney Robin Lockwood.