"Bowen's powers of invention are so florid and his satirical touch so bright, most readers won't care who gets carted off to jail."—Kirkus Reviews

When a frat boy finds himself on trial in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for piracy on the high seas, Lawyer Rep Pennyworth suspects he's being used as an unwitting accomplice in a cheap publicity stunt. Meanwhile Rep's professor wife Melissa gets caught in the middle of a verbal firefight between two colleagues that soon escalates into burglary, theft, jury-tampering, forgery—and murder.

Melissa wants to protect a naïve undergraduate who might be implicated. But when one of the other suspects makes Melissa a cast-iron alibi, her search for the truth leads through a maze of gray lies—including her own.

What with an investigative reporter who's still having flashbacks to 1968, a fellow professor whose acute political correctness masks ruthless academic ambition, an engineer whose father's heart attack may have been either suicide or murder, and a brace of cunning lawyers out for blood, Rep and Melissa must combine their talents to stay off the casualty list....