COURTING TROUBLE; by Lisa Scottoline; HarperCollins, 310 pages; $25.95.
Lisa Scottoline has been called "the female John Grisham," suggesting both a background and level of success comparable to the famed author of several best-selling legal thrillers.
It seems a fair analogy, except that Grisham may not be quite as good as she is.
A former trial lawyer, Scottoline writes very smart, witty books about crime and the courtroom. "Courting Trouble" is her ninth book — about Anne Murphy, a young woman lawyer in Philadelphia who happens to be both smart and gorgeous. And a redhead.
Unexpectedly, Anne leaves town on the Fourth of July weekend so she can prepare in solitude for a high-profile trial — but when she buys a morning newspaper, she finds her own picture in a front page story declaring that she has been murdered. She assumes the woman who was housesitting for her was killed, but it's obvious that Anne was the target.
Then she quickly remembers the perpetrator might be the stalker, Kevin Satorno, a dangerous man she helped put in prison — and who suffered from erotomania, a strange disorder that convinces an afflicted man that a certain woman is in love with him.
Other problems for Anne are that she has worked for an all-women's law firm in Philadelphia for just over a year, and she doesn't think that others in the firm even like her. She has few friends and certainly no one she thinks she can trust. So, as every good lawyer does in a crime novel, Anne starts doing detective work on her own.
When the other female attorneys in her law firm discover she is alive, they not only befriend Anne, but they dedicate themselves to finding the killer. (Apparently nothing much is happening at the law firm.)
This convinces Anne that her stunning beauty will not always deter other women from liking her, as they work together in a blustering kind of "Charlie's Angels" way, showing boldness and ingenuity on several occasions in their dogged effort to find Satorno.
Enough legal phrases are used to assure the reader that the author knows what she's talking about, but the tone is light. The women are competent enough not to need men to uncover this crime, yet the author tries, maybe a little too hard, to protect their femininity by referring to "girl trouble" or saying, "This is what happens when girls fight crime."
After all, Anne is known for her Blahnik shoes, which are popular on the Internet for "their extreme femininity and provocative sauciness," according to Manolo Blahnik, the designer (average cost: $500 per pair).
Bennie, the owner of the law firm, pretends to run things with an iron hand, but the other women always know how to get around her — especially if they do something illegal.
When Anne attends her own memorial service, she tries to "ignore the fact that her mother couldn't be bothered to attend, her lover had betrayed her, her client had lied through his bleached teeth and her psycho killer was still on the loose . . . she resolved on the spot to let her death change her life."
Scottoline inserts some patriotism into her Philadelphia story, with the climax coming during the ceremonial reading of the Declaration of Independence.
This is a fun book that just may start a run on women's law firms. It's funny, well-written and maintains a nice balance between a serious murder story and the repartee of quick-witted attorney/detectives.
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com