THE OUT-OF-TOWN LAWYER

An attorney returns to his hometown of Cole’s Crossing, Alabama, on behalf of a client who looks as if she hasn’t got a prayer of acquittal.

Destiny Grace Harper was pregnant with daughters afflicted by rare twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome that condemned them to likely death unless their mother underwent fetoscopic laser surgery, a procedure she rejected at the behest of Rev. Jeremiah Tipple, the pastor of the Church of Our Lord’s Rapture. Now that she’s fled her home and delivered two babies, one stillborn, the other dead within minutes, the state of Alabama has put her on trial for capital murder. Her mother, LeAnn Harper, whom the good pastor excommunicated after her cancer surgery, offers little help beyond urging her to replace public defender Aruna Patel Higgins with someone more effective; Rev. Tipple refuses to testify about Destiny’s motives; and Judge Merle Barraclough purges the jury pool of anyone who supports abortion. So Elvis Henderson, the former local boy turned attorney whose boss in Laredo takes on the case pro bono, has his work cut out for him. “My client is being tried for felony pregnancy,” he maintains, and it would be hard to disagree with him in a more sympathetic venue. As the story unfolds, Elvis’ attempt to prove that his client acted out of religious convictions that no one close to her is willing to document gets increasingly tangled with his own checkered past in Cole’s Crossing, a past that’s won him more than his share of enemies. Even though the case revolves around whydunit, not whodunit, Rotstein does an admirable job keeping up the tension en route to a series of surprising surprises.

A highly original courtroom drama ripped from the headlines and then some.