Defiance County: Signed

Galilee is only an hour and a half south of metropolitan Houston, but it might as well be in another world. The slow pace of life there is entirely controlled by an aging matriarch, Alice Beaumont, owner of the town's only significant enterprise - a successful apparel factory. But a hideous double murder has rocked Galilee's ruling family, tearing the town apart. Alice's younger daughter, Lorrie, and her husband, Ronnie, have been shot to death in Alice's parlor, and their infant daughter has been snatched from her crib. The local district attorney, Morgan Fletcher, is closely tied to the Beaumont family ... but he is also the brother of the chief suspect, and must remove himself from investigating the crime.
Thrust into this awful scenario is Kelsey Thatch, a young assistant DA sent from Austin as special prosecutor by the attorney general. At once, she feels the heavy hand of Alice Beaumont, pushing for the indictment and speedy trial of Billy Fletcher, who is Morgan's brother and her factory manager. Kelsey soon discovers that the townspeople's loyalties are fiercely divided between the accuser and the accused - and the entire population of Galilee is fixed in a grid of interlocking relationships that govern each one's actions.

An unexpected twist energizes this exemplary legal thriller: the reader is thrown right into the middle of the story, along with special prosecutor Kelsey Thatch, when she arrives in Galilee, Tex., to investigate a double murder and a kidnapping in which the main suspect, Billy Fletcher, is the brother of Galilee District Attorney Morgan Fletcher. Like many small-town crime novels, this one features a tangle of family relationships, as well as a matriarch who runs the place?here, the imposing Alice Beaumont, who owns the factory that dominates Galilee. Beaumont's daughter Lorrie was one of the murder victims; her granddaughter Taylor is missing; her daughter Katherine is Morgan Fletcher's wife, and so the accused's sister-in-law?which, in Beaumont's mind, gives her more than enough right to tell Kelsey how to run her prosecution. But there are many skeletons in the Beaumont family closet, and Kelsey discovers them in a series of revelations that draws the reader inexorably into an increasingly complicated plot. While the solution to the murder/kidnapping doesn't quite balance the buildup, all the other plot elements are well matched, from the skeleton in Kelsey's own closet to her romance with a police assistant who may or may not be trustworthy. Ex-DA Brandon (Local Rules) shines in the trial scenes, and throughout infuses vitality into an overworked genre.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Even after she's fled criminal law for a safe berth in the Texas Attorney General's Office--after impugning her own witness when she doubted an identification--Kelsey Thatch is condemned to the courtroom once again when her boss sends her to cozy Galilee to try Billy Fletcher, general manager of Smoothskins, the town's only reason for existing, for killing his sister-in-law and her husband and kidnapping the only witness to the crime, their five- month-old daughter. Despite the usual obstacles--small-town hostility, insufficient investigative help, no leads on the missing baby, no warmth from Smoothskins matriarch Alice Beaumont, no support from local D.A. Morgan Fletcher, Billy's brother, or the presiding judge, Morgan's old flame, and a circumstantial case that seems to grow weaker with every one of Kelsey's own witnesses--she manages the usual amazing successes: putting Billy's alibi witnesses on the defensive, outdueling Billy's lawyer in closing arguments, getting her own investigator to fall for her, and winning just the verdict she wants. Or does she? Though the ripely murderous Beaumont-Fletcher family ought to be as entertaining as the Borgias, Brandon's did-he-or-didn't- he scenario is too schematic to give them much breathing room. Even the courtroom cut-and-thrust--a trademark of Brandon's Lone Star thrillers (Local Rules, 1995, etc.)--is tired this time. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Kelsey Thatch, an assistant DA, is sent to a remote East Texas town to prosecute an unpleasant double murder involving the town's ruling family. A suspect is in custody, and the only puzzling aspect of the apparently straightforward case is that the dead couple's baby is missing. With more self-confidence than evidence, Kelsey takes the case to trial. Not much to our surprise, the obligatory reversal in the last chapter makes us see that the defendant, his relatives, and the courts of Defiance County have been carefully manipulated by the real murderer. This novel by the best-selling author of Loose Among the Lambs (Pocket, 1993) offers mildly diverting courtroom drama but is not interesting enough to overcome the flat dialog and weakly sketched characters. For large popular collections.?Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Brandon's latest is a taut courtroom drama with more than enough lawyerly jargon, unexpected twists, and last-gasp surprises to please the Grisham and Turow crowd. Kelsey Thatch, a big-city assistant DA, has just closed a case where her zeal for true justice has landed her in hot water. Now she has been sent (perhaps as punishment) to the backwater Texas town of Galilee to act as special prosecutor in a murder-kidnapping case. The accused is Billy Fletcher, who is related by marriage to the victims and is also the brother of Galilee's DA. Billy allegedly shot Ronald Blystone and his wife, Lorrie, in cold blood and kidnapped their infant daughter. Despite the evidence against Billy, most townsfolk believe he is innocent, and Kelsey must fight an uphill battle to find a jury unbiased enough to convict him. The action never slows in this intriguingly plotted, tautly written thriller. Emily Melton