Trophy Widow

It's easy to like Rachel Gold, the Reform Jewish lawyer with the Orthodox Jewish boyfriend. She's the kind of woman mothers want their sons to marry--a kind, funny, practical, hard-working single woman who's not showy but gets the job done. Unfortunately, all of Gold's good characteristics don't make her a particularly memorable series heroine in a field that's crowded with legal thrillers, and St. Louis, nicely rendered as it is here, isn't a particularly interesting setting. The plot is pretty straightforward; representing a woman doing time for killing her husband on a civil matter--who profits when the story of the battered wife who killed her husband and cut off his penis gets the million dollar book and movie treatment--Rachel discovers her client was framed, and that money, not passion, was the motive. The writing is skillful enough, but Kahn needs a more intricate plot or a more interesting character to sustain this series. --Jane Adams


Genre: Mystery