EVEN WHEN YOU LIE

A pair of murders bring the unsavory secrets of an Uptown Dallas law firm to light.

Despite her sterling credentials—she's a former captain in the U.S. Air Force and congressional aide—Reagan Reyes is on thin ice in her job with Holcombe & Donaldson. She’s not just junior partner Cade McCarrick’s investigator, but his lover, and company policy proscribes any such liaisons and prescribes strict sanctions for rule-breakers. Her situation becomes even more fraught when an untidy pink-haired woman storms into the posh office, demands to see Cade, and greets the news that she can’t by thrusting an envelope into Reagan’s hands and storming out. Impulsively following the woman into the street, Reagan is just in time to see her collapse on a bench, to be spirited off to the hospital, where she’ll be pronounced dead. The envelope’s contents—a birth certificate for one Cesar Morales, an alcoholic beverage permit for Club Saturnalia, and a faded photograph of two teenagers—seem innocuous enough, but together they spell danger for everyone at the firm, from blue-blooded managing partner Bridger Holcombe down to Reagan, the newest arrival and the most vulnerable. Alternating among Reagan’s attempts to work out the source of the threats, her unlikely alliances with people like homeless Army Ranger Rafi Velasquez and Lupita Morales, Cesar’s grandmother, and her bouts of forbidden sex with Cade, Cruz slowly peels back the layers of malfeasance that have kept Holcombe & Donaldson aloft for so many years until a deliriously extended climax shows the last of the firm’s skeletons leaping from the closet.

A powerful indictment of systemic racism at its most insidious.