Conflict of Interest

A DEFENSE IS NOT A VERDICT. IT IS THE MACHINE FOR FINDING OUT - AND SOMEBODY HAS TO RUN IT.On arraignment day in Birch County, the county’s only public defender looks across the courtroom at the man accused of murdering her sister. The law says Nora Calloway must step aside. The county says there is no one to take her place. So she stays - defending Dale Ferris in a courthouse with one judge, a broken air conditioner, and a paper mill that owns the county’s silence - while her client’s secrets and her sister’s last months pull the case toward a night in April that no file has ever told whole.The story runs on two clocks. In the present tense, one case moves from arraignment to verdict at courtroom speed - mostly waiting, mostly paper, and then, without warning, a single day when everything turns on one witness’s answer. In italic chapters that run underneath it, the dead sister keeps her own record: her shifts at the feed store, her fishing spot on a creek where the fish have started to float, photographs of a dying river, and a list of dates kept in her own handwriting.A courtroom novel where the law is real law - and the town is so faithfully drawn you’ll swear you’ve driven through it.A small-town mystery where corruption is erosion, not a suitcase of cash.A story of grief doing both jobs at once.The crisis at the heart of this story - one lawyer trying to be an entire county’s defense system and it is happening in rural America right now.For readers of Presumed Innocent and Mare of Easttown.