Jury Duty

Novelist Libby Winslow shows up for jury duty, fully expecting to sit around for a few days and then be dismissed. But not this time. This time she's been chosen to sit on the "Poor Little Rich Boy" trial, the most sensational Manhattan murder case in decades. The defendant is the son of an immensely rich business tycoon. The victim was a famous model. The facts of the case are sex, drugs, and obsession. As Libby is thrown together with a group of total strangers to decide the fate of the defendant, two of her fellow jurors come head to head over their romantic interest in her: Alex, a handsome renovation contractor (about whom Libby senses something vaguely disturbing), and William, a wealthy Wall Streeter who openly lives with another woman. Then there is Libby's new friend on the jury, Melissa, the advertising wunderkind, who has some sort of secret love affair going on in her life. Meanwhile, out in the courtroom, day after day, week after week, Jill Cook Tompkins watches the trial from the gallery. Jill is a housewife from suburbia. She has two young children. She would have no place here if it hadn't been her sister who was so brutally slain on the streets of New York. And so now she must wait... and watch... and pray that the jurors will see through the best web of lies money can buy.