Courting Trouble (Rosato and Associates Series #9) » (Unabridged)

For anyone who has ever read one of Lisa Scottoline s funny, sexy, and addictively readable thrillers, it should come as no surprise that she seems to be having as much fun writing her provocative tales of intrigue as her fans have reading them.

Anne Murphy is smart, gorgeous, and young, the red-headed rookie at the Philadelphia law firm of Rosato & Associates. She leaves town for the Fourth of July weekend to prepare for a high-profile trial, but when she buys her morning newspaper, her own photo is plastered all over the front page. And the headline - LAWYER MURDERED - supposedly refers to her. Anne sets out to find her killer, playing dead in order to stay alive.

She tries to go it alone but quickly realizes that she'll have to trust people she barely knows - colleagues who hate her guts, a homicide squad who wants her out of the crime-fighting business, and a new love who inconveniently happens to be opposing counsel. The investigation takes all of Anne's boldness and ingenuity - plus a pair of red satin hot pants. But her knack for courting trouble makes it almost impossible for Anne to play well with others, defend the lawsuit, and fight her urge to sleep with the enemy. Then an unexpected event places her in...

Publishers Weekly

New York Times bestseller Scottoline's cast of beautiful female lawyers at Philadelphia's Rosato & Associates is augmented by red-headed bombshell Anne Murphy, a woman with a secret past, who's trying to make a go of it in a new city. An intriguing character jammed into a laborious plot, Murphy toils as a career-minded loner. On a much-needed weekend away from her heavy caseload, she picks up a newspaper to read that she has been murdered by an intruder who blasted her in the face with a shotgun. Murphy knows the real victim was the woman who had agreed to feed her cat; she also knows that the murderer was likely Kevin Satorno, the stalker who nearly killed her a year earlier while she was living in Los Angeles. Murphy figures that if Satorno discovers he actually killed the wrong person, he'll continue hunting her, so she decides to play dead and enlist the help of her new colleagues at Rosato & Associates to track him down. Scottoline (The Vendetta Defense; Moment of Truth) wraps up the far-fetched action in high style, with a few predictable twists, at Philly's big outdoor Fourth of July celebration. As in her eight previous women-in-peril legal thrillers, she tempers the plot's bloodshed with a bouncy tone that some readers may find cloying. But this doesn't bother the former lawyer's growing base of fans she's now translated into 25 languages and despite Murphy's occasional "you go, girl" silliness, she's the best character Scottoline has created in a while. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.