Taylor Lockwood juggles twin careers as a struggling jazz musician in seedy Manhattan clubs and a paralegal at the genteel Wall Street law firm of Hubbard, White & Willis. When a multimillion-dollar promissory note is stolen from his office, Mitchell Reece, a young trial lawyer, desperately enlists her aid to save both his career and, very possibly, the firm itself. Taylor agrees, intrigued by both the brilliant attorney and the offbeat assignment. As she plays.

Detective, she learns that beneath the Victorian facades of the firm and its partners are simmering caldrons of dark secrets that increasingly blur the line between business and pleasure, and life and death. Jeffery Wilds Deaver gives us a shocking look at the stratosphere of New York business and society in this stylish book, which is filled with the wholly real characters, right-on dialogue, and unpredictable plot twists he's known for. Its gut-wrenching ending is more.

Shocking than Presumed Innocent's. The nonstop action in Mistress of Justice moves from tension-filled courtrooms to East Village performance spaces, from Hell's Kitchen bordellos to lavish country homes and hushed Midtown clubs where careers, and even lives, are manipulated like so many business deals. The firms, the families and their money may date from the last century, but the ambition and greed are totally up to date and mean nothing but danger for a young upstart.

Like Taylor Lockwood--danger in more ways than she can guess.