GUILTY MINDS

Hired to clear the chief justice of the United States of dallying with a call girl, Boston-based investigator Nick Heller becomes entwined in a complicated scheme that leads to murder.

Superattorney Gideon Parnell is the Washington VIP who hires Heller. A black civil rights hero who's golfed with all the golfing presidents since LBJ, he's capable of pulling any and all strings in D.C. But he's powerless to prevent the gossip website Slander Sheet from running an exposé about Chief Justice Jeremiah Claflin, who reputedly was given three nights with the hooker by a casino mogul in whose favor he had ruled in a recent case. Heller has 48 hours to discredit the story. It's easy enough to determine that Claflin never set foot in the hotel room in which he is said to have consorted with young Kayla Pitts—whose working name is Heidi L'Amour. (The judge has one of the better alibis: he was having electroshock treatment.) But after Pitts is found dead, an apparent suicide, and Heller and his crack team infiltrate the secret ownership of Slander Sheet, unsettling new wrinkles in the case point to an unlikely suspect. The book, the third and best entry in a series, is about as airtight as you can get, plotwise. Heller, a former Special Forces operative in Iraq, is a convincing combination of physical toughness and intelligence—one of the book's pleasures is its descriptions of modern detection techniques. And in Mandy Seeger, the former ace Washington Post reporter who lives to regret writing for Slander Sheet, Heller has an attractive running partner and romantic interest.

Finder shows off his top-notch storytelling skills, moving with ease from high places to low in the nation's capital.