As St. Louis attorney Rachel Gold knows firsthand, the grueling hours and demands of Big Law take their toll on young lawyers. Some turn to drugs, some quit the profession, and occasionally one quits altogether. According to the medical examiner, Sari Bashir quit altogether that Thursday night when she fell to her death from the eighth floor of the downtown garage where she parked her car.

The police ruled her death a suicide. Stanley Plotkin, however, rules it a homicide. Stanley is the weird mail-room clerk at Sari’s law firm, but he is also a genius. Among his obsessions is the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), a massive compilation that correlates hundreds of facial muscle actions with specific emotions and mental states. For someone like Stanley, whose Asperger’s syndrome renders him incapable of intuiting emotions from facial expressions, his mastery of FACS has caused him to conclude that Sari did not kill herself.

Rachel was close with Sari, who worked for her during law school. She also knows Stanley–and his quirkiness and genius–because their mothers are friends. Thus when Stanley announces his conclusion to Rachel as she drives him home from Sari’s memorial service, she can’t simply dismiss it. And when Sari’s father pleads with Rachel to review the police file on his daughter’s suicide, she reluctantly starts down a path that will lead into the heart of a dark criminal enterprise in which Sari was simply collateral damage.

Several years have passed since we last saw Rachel Gold. The stunning and savvy attorney was then engaged to be married. Since that time she has become a mother and a much-grieving widow, and now she is embroiled in a lost cause–the Frankenstein case–representing a blue-collar neighborhood fighting a powerful developer intent on bulldozing their homes to erect a swanky gated community. Who’s pushing her here? Her mother, of course.

Rachel’s strategy will be based on a wild card: the judge on the case–a judge so wacky that he’s known to the Saint Louis bar as the Flinch Factor, as in the spawn of Judge Judy and Pee-wee Herman.

Rachel has also gained a new client: Susannah, sister of Nick Moran, heartthrob of every woman whose kitchen he remodeled. Nick has been murdered, found slumped on the front seat of his pickup along an isolated lane known to the vice squad as Gay Way, his pants unzipped, a coil of rubber tubing on the seat, an empty syringe on the floor. His female groupies are stunned, to say the least–Nick gay? No way. Susannah seeks out Rachel, convinced that her brother wasn’t gay or a druggie and that his death was not an accident.

Although Susannah seems the classic blindly adoring younger sister, a skeptical Rachel agrees to check it out. To her surprise, she turns up facts and witnesses suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Nick’s death was staged to look like an overdose during sex. Things then rapidly grow darker in what increasingly becomes a real Frankenstein of a case.