Late one night Victor Carl gets a panicked phone call from an old law school classmate. Guy Forrest claims he has just found the body of his fiancé lying murdered in the house they shared. The victim is Hailey Prouix, for whose love Guy had abandoned his children, his job, his wife, his life. Hailey had mesmerized every man she ever met -- including, unbeknownst to Guy, Victor Carl. Convinced that Guy is Hailey's killer, Victor agrees to represent him, all the while secretly vowing to see justice done, whatever the cost. Victor embarks on a quest that will take him from Philadelphia to Las Vegas to the valleys of West Virginia. He digs further into Hailey Prouix's past and discovers that nothing is as simple as it had seemed, especially the woman he thought he loved. As Guy's murder trial heads toward its shattering conclusion, Victor must find the brutal truth before the mechanism of retribution he himself has set into motion falls like a hatchet, smack on his client's head. Late one night Victor Carl gets a panicked phone call from an old law school classmate. Guy Forrest claims he has just found the body of his fiancé lying murdered in the house they shared. The victim is Hailey Prouix, for whose love Guy had abandoned his children, his job, his wife, his life. Hailey had mesmerized every man she ever met -- including, unbeknownst to Guy, Victor Carl. Convinced that Guy is Hailey's killer, Victor agrees to represent him, all the while secretly vowing to see justice done, whatever the cost. Victor embarks on a quest that will take him from Philadelphia to Las Vegas to the valleys of West Virginia. He digs further into Hailey Prouix's past and discovers that nothing is as simple as it had seemed, especially the woman he thought he loved. As Guy's murder trial heads toward its shattering conclusion, Victor must find the brutal truth before the mechanism of retribution he himself has set into motion falls like a hatchet, smack on his client's head. New York Times bestselling author William Lashner is the author of seven suspense novels that have been published in more than a dozen languages throughout the world. A graduate of the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, he lives with his family outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Peter Francis James has starred in numerous Broadway and off-Broadway productions, as well as on such television programs as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit , New York Undercover and State of Affairs .