Mistress of Justice by Jeffery Deaver

Taylor Lockwood spends her days working as a paralegal in one of New York's pre-eminent Wall Street law firms and her nights playing jazz piano anywhere she can. But the rhythm of her life is disrupted when attorney Mitchell Reece requests her help in locating a stolen document that could cost him not only the multimillion dollar case he's defending but his career as well. Eager to get closer to this handsome, brilliant and very private man, Taylor signs on...only to find that as she delves deeper and deeper into what goes on behind closed doors at Hubbard, White & Willis, she uncovers more than she wants to know - including a plenitude of secrets damaging enough to smash careers and dangerous enough to push someone to commit murder. Yet who is capable of going to that extreme? With her life on the line, Taylor is about to learn the lethal answer... Amazon Review Taylor Lockwood, jazz-playing paralegal heroine of Mistress of Justice, is one of the smart, sassy heroines in whom Jeffery Deaver specialised before he invented the austere paralysed criminalist Lincoln Rhyme. Like Rune in Manhattan is My Beat, Taylor is clever, but not quite as good at things as she thinks she is--she trusts a few too many people and lets her preconceptions get in her way; Deaver has always done a nice line in the detective who gets things wrong quite a lot of the time. Taylor is brought in by Reece, a Wall Street hot-shot, to work out who has stolen a crucial document, and where they have hidden it. Along the way, she uncovers most of the dirty little secrets of the partners of the firm and finds herself having to exercise judgement about each of them; she has refused to follow her father into the law because of her music, but she finds herself caught up in justice all the same. This is an early book which Deaver has reworked--it has the technical slickness that is now his hallmark, but keeps the joie de vivre which it has to some extent replaced. --Roz Kaveney Review The best psychological thriller writer around (The Times) Review The best psychological thriller writer around (The Times) Book Description Deaver's first novel, rewritten since first publication to bring it up to the highest possible standard. About the Author Jeffery Deaver is the award-winning author of two collections of short stories and 29 internationally bestselling novels, including the latest James Bond novel Carte Blanche. He is best known for his Lincoln Rhyme thrillers, which include the number one bestsellers The Vanished Man, The Twelfth Card and The Cold Moon, as well as The Bone Collector which was made into a feature film starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. The first Kathryn Dance novel, The Sleeping Doll, was published in 2007 to enormous acclaim. A three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader's Award for Best Short Story of the year, he has been nominated for an Anthony Award and six Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America. He won the WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award in 2001 and in 2004 won the Crime Writers' Association Steel Dagger for Best Thriller with Garden of Beasts, and their Short Story Dagger for The Weekender from Twisted. Jeffery Deaver lives in North Carolina and California. Visit his website, www.jefferydeaver.com, Facebook page, www.facebook.com/JefferyDeaver, and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/JefferyDeaver. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The drapery man had been warned that even though it was now well after midnight, Sunday morning of the Thanksgiving holiday, there would very likely be people in the firm here, attorneys and paralegals, still working. And so he carried the weapon at his side, pointed downward. It was a curious thing - not a knife exactly, more of an ice pick, but longer and made of a blackened, tempered metal. He held it with the confidence of someone who was very familiar with the device. And who had used it before. Dressed in gray coveralls bearing the stencil of a bogus drapery cleaning service and wearing a baseball cap, the big, sandy-haired man now paused and, hearing footsteps, slipped into an empty office. Then there was silence. And he continued on, through shadows, pausing for a long moment, frozen like a fox near a ground nest of skittish birds. He consulted the diagram of the firm, turned along one corridor and continued, gripping the handle of the weapon tightly in his hand, which was as muscular as the rest of his body. As he neared the office he sought, he reached up and pulled a paper face mask over his mouth. This was not so that he wouldn't be recognized but because he was concerned that he might lose a fleck of spit that could be retrieved as evidence and used in a DNA match. The office, which belonged to Mitchell Reece, was at the end of the corridor, not far from the front door of the firm. Like all the offices here, the lights were left on, which meant that the drapery man wasn't sure that it was unoccupied. But he glanced in quickly, saw that the room was empty and stepped inside. The office was very cluttered. Books, files, charts, thousands of sheets of papers. Still, the man found the filing cabinet easily - there was only one here with two locks on it and crouched, pulling on tight latex gloves and extracting his tool kit from his coverall pockets. The drapery man set the weapon nearby and began to work on the locks. Scarf, Mitchell Reece thought, drying his hands in the law firm's marble-and-oak rest room. He'd forgotten his wool scarf. Well, he was surprised he'd managed to remember his coat and briefcase. The lanky thirty-three-year-old associate, having had only four hours' sleep, had arrived at the firm around 8 A.M. yesterday, Saturday, and had worked straight through until about an hour ago, when he'd fallen asleep at his desk. A few moments before, something had startled him out of that sleep. He'd roused himself and decided to head home for a few hours of shut-eye the old-fashioned way - horizontally. He'd grabbed his coat and briefcase and made this brief pit stop. But he wasn't going outside without his scarf - 1010 WINS had just reported the temperature was 22 degrees and falling. Reece stepped into the silent corridor. Thinking about a law firm at night. The place was shadowy but not dark, silent yet filled with a white noise of memory and power. A law firm wasn't like other places: banks or corporations or museums or concert halls; it seemed to remain alert even when its occupants were gone. Here, down a wide wallpapered corridor, was a portrait of a man in stern sideburns, a man who left his partnership at the firm to become governor of the state of New York. Here, in a small foyer decorated with fresh flowers, was an exquisite Fragonard oil painting, no alarm protecting it. In the hall beyond, two Keith Harings and a Chagall. Here, in a conference room, were reams of papers containing the magic words required by the law to begin a corporate breach of contract suit for three hundred million dollars, and in a similar room down the hall sat roughly the same amount of paper, assembled in solemn blue binders, which would create a charitable trust to fund private AIDS research. Here, in a locked safe-file room, rested the last will and testament of the world's third-richest man whose name most people had never heard of. Mitchell Reece put these philosophical meanderings down to sleep deprivation, told himself to mentally shut up and turned down the corridor that would lead to his office. Footsteps approaching. In a soldier's instant the drapery man was on his feet, the ice pick in one hand, his burglar tools in the other. He eased behind the door to Reece's office and quieted his breathing as best he could. He'd been in this line of work for some years. He'd been hurt in fights and had inflicted a great deal of pain. He'd killed seven men and two women. But this history didn't dull his emotions. His heart now beat hard, his palms sweated and he fervently hoped he didn't have to hurt anyone tonight. Even people like him vastly preferred to avoid killing. Which didn't mean he'd hesitate to if he were found out here. The steps grew closer.