RUNNING FROM THE LAW

Rita Morrone won't reveal her age, but she's old enough to have a pretty solid position in her Philadelphia law firm, a great poker circle, a fortyish architect lover, and a gratifyingly innocent client in a high-profile sexual harassment case. A couple of problems, though: The client, Judge Fiske Hamilton, is her live-in Paul's father; Paul seems to have given Rita a sexually transmitted (though not life-threatening) malady; and the harassment case gets dropped under the worst circumstances—when plaintiff Patricia Sullivan, the judge's secretary, gets herself slightly murdered. Guess who the police lock up. Swearing she wants off the case, Rita, whose take-no-prisoners sense of humor and notion of Legal Ethics Lite are like a double blast of fresh air, allows herself to be railroaded into the judge's defense—but between continually locking faithless Paul out of their shared home and grieving over a burst of violence uncomfortably close to home, she barely has the energy for any detective work. No matter: Except for the anticlimactic closing pages, most of her story is solid gold. Scottoline's hardcover debut is a keeper, with a heroine who's almost as funny as she thinks she is—which puts her miles ahead of most other lawyers you know.