Dismas Hardy and Abe Glitsky are back in this courtroom thriller.  Maya Townshend is the absentee owner of the Bay Beans West coffee shop.  She is beautiful and wealthy, and the  socialite niece of the city's mayor. Now, Dismas is duty-bound to defend her against a murder charge when Volger, the manager of her coffee shop, is killed in the alley behind the shop.  Volger has a backpack full of marijuana, and the gun lying beside him, which may have been the murder weapon, is registered to Maya.

The head of the homicide department, Abe Glitsky, has been preoccupied because his little son is near death from a horrible accident, and has allowed a slip-shod investigation to get out of control. Now the mayor and several other political dignitaries are in trouble in a high stakes investigation resulting from the flubbed murder investigation. But then news sources discover a list of names of customers that Volger was supplying with marijuana, and it turns out that celebrities, politicians, and even law enforcement personnel are on the list. When a second man connected with Maya's past is murdered, Hardy begins to question what was actually going on inside Maya's business.  It looks like she may actually be guilty.

Complicated plotting and compelling characters are Lescroart's hallmark, and he manages to escalate the tension to a nail-biting surprise ending that I did not see coming.  Don't start this book until you have time to finish it, because it is impossible to put down.  I have read all of Lescroart's books—some are better than others—and he is at the top of his form in this one.