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A brutal murder rocks a city. An innocent man stands accused. And justice is the next to die. In a city of tolerance and hope, everything came apart. One man died at the hands of another. The next victim was killed by a mob. Now fires burn in the night, helicopters throb through the air, and politicians, lawyers and cops vie for the remnants of power... Somewhere in the once-placid streets of San Francisco, a young man is on the run, charged by the media with a crime he didn't commit, hounded by demagogues, hunted by a desperate police department. One cop knows that Kevin Shea is innocent of a brutal racial murder. An ambitious politician will use Shea for her own ends. And a down-and-out lawyer is all that stands between Kevin Shea and an even more atrocious crime. For when there's no law left, justice is the only hope...
A brutal murder rocks a city. An innocent man stands accused. And justice is the next to die. In a city of tolerance and hope, everything came apart. One man died at the hands of another. The next victim was killed by a mob. Now fires burn in the night, helicopters throb through the air, and politicians, lawyers and cops vie for the remnants of power... Somewhere in the once-placid streets of San Francisco, a young man is on the run, charged by the media with a crime he didn't commit, hounded by demagogues, hunted by a desperate police department. One cop knows that Kevin Shea is innocent of a brutal racial murder. An ambitious politician will use Shea for her own ends. And a down-and-out lawyer is all that stands between Kevin Shea and an even more atrocious crime. For when there's no law left, justice is the only hope...
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
At about eight-ten on an unusually hot and sultry evening a couple of weeks before the Fourth of July, Michael Mullen, a thirty-nine-year-old white accountant with a wife and three children all under eight, stopped his new black Honda Prelude at the corner of 19th and Dolores in the outer Noe Valley District of San Francisco. Dolores is a divided street with a wide grassy area occasionally pocked with trees between the north and south lanes.
According to witnesses, a young black male was walking in this divider strip when Mullen pulled up to the stop sign at 19th. The driver immediately behind Mullen, a kid named Josh Cane, noticed that, with the heat, Mullen had his driver's window open, his elbow sticking out resting on it.
The young man in the divider strip, who'd been walking north, the same direction both Mullen and Cane had been driving, closed the remaining feet between himself and Mullen in a couple of athletic bounds, "like he was jumping over some mud or something." (Rayanne Jonas, fifty-six, an African-American day-care provider, walking home from the center on Army, where she worked.)
"I saw he was already holding something, which then, I mean at that time, I thought was a pipe, and then I realized..."
It turned out it was a gun, which the man stuck into Mullen's temple. He pulled the trigger. The report was loud enough that Cane—in his car with his windows up and his air conditioner blasting—heard it "like a crack of thunder."
The only witness with the wherewithal to move in the following seconds, to try to do anything at all, was a fifteen-year-old Hispanic youth named Luis Santillo, who was on his way home from his afterschool job at the fast food place down the street on 16th and Guerrero. He, too, saw the athletic man take the leaps, aim the gun, and fire.
"Hey!" he yelled. "What the hell..." He started running toward Mullen's car.
Meanwhile, ignoring Luis and everything else, the assailant pulled the door of the car, reached in, grabbed, and with one hand pulled Mullen out, lifted his wallet, and dumped his body on the street.
Luis, twenty feet in front of the car and still coming, still yelling, froze as the vehicle accelerated, the driver's door swinging half-open. The car fishtailed slightly on the pavement, corrected, then jumped forward through the intersection, its left bumper hitting Luis, bouncing him first off the hood and windshield, and then throwing him seventy-six feet into a juniper bush in the divider strip, which saved his life, although the pins in his hip would probably prevent him from ever jumping athletically like the shooter.
The car, gaining speed, "went off like a rocket, just going and going 'til it was out of sight" (Riley Willson, a car mechanic at his own shop, Riley's Garage, on the northeast corner of 19th and Dolores.)
On June 20, the car—or what was left of it—was recovered. Its doors were gone, as were the tires. The body had been tagged by what must have been every kid with a can of spray paint in the neighborhood. The car had been abandoned on Moscow Street hard by the Crocker-Amazon Playground, a common dump spot south of the 280 Freeway, almost to the city limits.
Besides the traces of cocaine, marijuana seeds and roaches, beer cans and other debris, the car yielded such a beautiful fingerprint—in blood—on the back side of the steering wheel, that Shawanda Mboto, the San Francisco Police Department specialist in these matters, let out a war whoop from her perch by her...
Reviews-
Starred review from July 31, 1995 Politics and justice mix like oil and water after racial tensions erupt into violence in this taut and engrossing San Francisco-set thriller. Lescroart (The 13th Juror) wastes no time setting up his story. In the first few, galvanizing pages, an African American lawyer is lynched by a mob of drunk Irish Americans incensed at the murder of one of their friends by a black career criminal. Alone in trying to save the doomed lawyer is Keven Shea, a 28-year-old grad student. But when a photograph showing him trying to hand the lawyer a knife to cut loose the noose is interpreted as an attempted stabbing, Shea, who goes on the lam, becomes the target of a citywide manhunt. He also becomes San Francisco's chief symbol of racial unrest as politicians ranging from the city's district attorney to a U.S. senator pursue their personal interest in declaring him guilty; only Lt. Abe Glitsky, head of the city's homicide detail, seems to be looking at the case objectively. Meanwhile, Shea turns for help to his girlfriend and, in one of the author's few nods toward cliche, to a down-and-out lawyer pal. Throughout, Lescroart keeps a sharp eye on both the big picture and the individual views of a multitude of well-drawn characters. By showing the political maneuvering that can accompany an outbreak of violence, he offers an unusually thoughtful, exciting thriller that evinces insight into incidents and attitudes that seem all too real. 125,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club featured alternates; author tour.
August 5, 1996 An innocent man is accused of spearheading a racially motivated murder in Lescroart's latest thriller.
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