Defended to Death

Mara Landry is the best public defender in New Orleans, and for seven years she has treated attorney-client privilege like the confessional, except that she hands out the penance herself. Once a violent client walks, she waits a decent interval and calls him back to close out his file, and if she believes what he tells her in that room, he's dead before long of something the coroner calls an accident. Nobody looks twice until one of them turns up drowned at the Lakefront seawall beside a latched tackle box and Detective Terry Batiste starts pulling the files of acquitted men who ended up in the ground. Then Emile Fontaine, a courtly estate manager charged with poisoning the elderly widow in his care, asks for Mara by name. He has spent months in the parish jail listening to the talk about who walks and who falls, and he knows exactly what his lawyer is. He has also arranged for the proof to reach Batiste if he dies, of anything.