Elizabeth Finnegan is a lawyer with an attitude. A short fuse and a propensity to speak before she thinks get her into trouble, but that doesn’t detract from her brilliance as a defence attorney. At just 26, she’s a rising star in a Seattle law firm.

Liz, as she is known to her friends, fights for feminist causes, and that puts her in conflict with anti-abortionists. When a Seattle clinic is bombed she goes to court to seek an expanded no-go zone to protect the patients. An impassioned speech earns her no sympathy from the judge. She’s mobbed by sign-toting anti-abortionists and a mysterious stranger begins to follow her.

That’s one part of this story. A second begins when Finnegan objects to a rape sentence of only six months of home detention and a year of community service. In a TV interview she fumes that a better sentence would have been castration – of the judge’s brain.

The judge takes exception. A battle of words follows, but then a woman tells Finnegan that the judge raped her 27 years ago, when she worked with him on a college newspaper. Prosecutors refuse to act, so on impulse Finnegan accuses the judge publicly, hoping he’ll take civil action. She’ll prove the rape occurred and use a defence of truth against a slander suit. The judge takes the bait. A vicious courtroom clash ensues.

William Deverell, whose Trial of Passion won the Hammett Prize and the Arthur Ellis Award, builds exhaustive profiles of two complex individuals who, though locked in near mortal combat, experience a strange mutual attraction that neither can understand or admit. The courtroom scenes are not as dry as the slander charge suggests, thanks to Finnegan’s tactics. But it’s the dénouement that reveals the sure hand of the master plotter. The two parts of the story merge in a brain-bender ending. Deverell fans get the full monty with Slander.