Suspicion of Innocence - Hardcover

Parker, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525937447 ISBN 13: 9780525937449

Publisher: Dutton, 1994

Synopsis

Gail Pettis must put aside her own problems--a failing marriage, a looming custody battle, and a faltering legal career--when her sister, Renee, is murdered. A first novel. 40,000 first printing. $40,000 ad/promo.

About this title

About the Author:

Barbara Parker was trained as a lawyer and worked as a prosecutor with the state attorney’s office in Dade County, Florida, before moving into a private practice that specialized in real estate and family law. Parker earned a master’s degree in creative writing in 1993. Her first legal thriller was Suspicion of Innocence, published in 1994, which was followed by another seven titles in the series featuring her two lawyer protagonists, and sometime lovers Gail Connor and Anthony Quintana. While writing the series, she also produced Criminal Justice, Blood Relations, The Perfect Fake, and The Dark of Day. Suspicion of Innocence was a finalist for the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Two of her titles, Suspicion of Deceit and Suspicion of Betrayal were New York Times bestsellers. Barbara Parker died in March 2009, at age sixty-two.

From Kirkus Reviews:

The apparent suicide of her libertine younger sister leads an up-and-coming Wasp lawyer into the orbit of a Cuban grandee and his attractive family--and to an indictment for murder--in an intelligently steamy first novel. Jimmy Panther, an understandably cynical Indian Everglades tour guide and alligator handler, discovered the body of pretty Renee Pettis while showing a Scandinavian family the saurian terrors outside Miami. As it happened, Mr. Panther recognized the corpse from a distance, having had some rather odd business dealings with Renee in the recent past. Mr. Panther is just one of the upsetting characters who enter attorney Gail Connor's life as she tries to tie up the many loose ends her sister has left lying around the city. Gail quickly learns that Renee carried on with drug-dealers, was into rather advanced sexual activities, and secretly met Gail's husband, Dave, regularly for lunch. Was Dave the father of Renee's unborn child? He says not. Perhaps the father was too-slick property developer Carlos Pedrosa, with whom Renee carried on for months? Gail sincerely hopes the father was not Carlos's cousin Anthony Quintana, the exceptionally handsome lawyer she just met in court. She rather fancies Anthony--and, as it turns out, she will rather need him when the Miami police decide that Renee could not have slit her own wrists but that Gail very likely could have. It takes every bit of the family's political pull and spare cash to keep Gail out on bail so that she can find out why anyone would want to kill Renee, how Jimmy Panther got his hands on a valuable Indian artifact that seems to have something to do with the murder, what it is about her mother's cousin Ben that arouses such deep emotions, and exactly what she is going to do about the attractive but excessively secretive Mr. Quintana. Not terribly mysterious but deft, sexy, and populated with enough interesting characters for two books. Parker makes excellent use of Miami. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dutton
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0525937447
• ISBN 13: 9780525937449
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352