This is the third book I've read in the author's series featuring Tennessee lawyer Joe Dillard, and I continue to be amazed at how much I'm enjoying them. This is the best so far, IMHO - I didn't want to put it down (just ask my husband, who was forced to eat an extra-late dinner one day because I had just a few chapters left to read). Dillard has moved from a defense attorney to the prosecutor's office, but from both sides now he's had to deal with the same hard-nosed, unfair and vindictive criminal court judge. When that judge's body turns up charred and hanging from a tree, Dillard isn't exactly crying, but then he finds himself at the center of the investigation. The son of his son's best friend, it turns out, is the prime suspect (the judge, it seems, had done his daddy wrong). Worse, the young college student has, in a panic, given critical evidence to Dillard's wife, who in turn destroyed it - thus committing a potentially criminal act that puts Dillard square in the middle of an ethics dilemma.
A second story line follows a young girl who loses her entire family - then most of another - and a third focuses on the sudden disappearance of a young woman who recently joined the district attorney's office. There's even a fourth as Dillard struggles with his unsuccessful defense of a client who was convicted and has just been executed - a client Dillard continues to believe was innocent.
All these situations are brought to closure by the end, of course; some happily, others not so much, depending on who you're rooting for. And, a big change at the end makes me eager to read the next installment (not that I wasn't already). Bring it on!
Injustice for All by Scott Pratt (Phoenix Flying Inc., December 2013); 367 pp.
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