Introduction

Just out of Harvard Law School, Kate Paine is on the fast track at Samson & Mills, the nation's richest, most powerful law firm. Assigned to assist the charismatic managing partner in a high-profile sexual harassment case, Kate can hardly believe her luck. But with the brutal murder of Madeline Waters, a beautiful female partner, Kate's carefully constructed world begins to collapse. A mysterious warning from the dead woman just hours before her death leaves Kate terrified and confused—could she be the killer's next target?

Finding herself in a race against time to unlock the secrets of Madeline's violent death, Kate delves far beneath Samson & Mills' smooth veneer discovering a shocking legacy of abuse and betrayal—a legacy that may hold the key to solving the murder, as well as to Kate's own survival.

Editorial Review

Harvard Law School graduate Kate Paine, heroine of Amy Gutman's Equivocal Death, is supposed to be smart. But as the new hire at Samson & Mills, one of the country's most powerful and successful firms, she can't figure out who's behind the murder of partner Madeleine Waters. She's also gullible enough to buy the lies the other partners are spinning to keep the firm from collapsing, or maybe she's too busy to figure out their deceptions. When she's not working 90 hours a week, she's fretting over the law school romance that went up in flames and left her unwilling to trust any man except Justin Daniels, her platonic buddy from her Cambridge days, and Carter Mills, the senior partner who hired her. She barely has time to spare for the appealing inner-city teenager she's supposed to be mentoring, but Josie understands Kate enough to know that when she's late for an appointment, she must be in trouble.

Unfortunately, Josie's not around when Kate has an ugly encounter with the firm's biggest client--an incident Kate keeps to herself, which further underlines the reader's impression that she's too dumb to have made it as far as she has in the cutthroat world she inhabits. Certainly, she's too slow on the uptake to see the clues that point to the murderer, whom most readers will have figured out many pages before the conclusion of this tepid thriller. Gutman's writing is clear enough, but her characters are one-dimensional. Fans who aren't too choosy about their legal thrillers or just can't wait for the next Grisham may not be bothered by these shortcomings. --Jane Adams

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