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Bearing Witness

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

"Bearing Witness grips you from the start. If you have not read Michael Kahn's terrific legal thrillers before, you are in for a treat." —Philip Margolin, New York Times bestselling author

Rachel Gold blames it on her mother, Sarah, who convinced her to file what seemed like a simple age-discrimination case on behalf of Ruth Alpert, her mother's best friend. Ruth had been fired just shy of her sixty-third birthday by Beckmann Engineering, a corporate powerhouse known in St. Louis, both for its charitable contributions and vicious lawyers.

The first hint that the case might not be so simple comes when a key witness is gunned down in a parking lot before Rachel's eyes. The second comes when Rachel learns that Ruth has knowledge of confidential information that could transform her simple age claim into a massive, multi-million-dollar conspiracy case spanning decades.

With the help of her best friend, Benny Goldberg—the grossest (and funniest) law professor in America—the savvy and beautiful Rachel Gold struggles to make sense of a dark scheme hatched more than a fifty years ago, a conspiracy with a bloody trail of murder, mayhem, and treachery that implicates some of the wealthiest and most respected elder citizens in the country. These men have guarded their vile secret for half a century and will take whatever steps are necessary to protect it from disclosure.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 4, 2000
      Kahn's latest legal thriller sets his series protagonist (and narrator) against a Goliath law firm and a crew of ex- and neo-Nazis in an intricate St. Louis civil suit. A secretary's age-discrimination case against litigious Beckman Engineering leads Rachel Gold to discover a multimillion-dollar bid-rigging conspiracy, which becomes the basis for a new and far more consequential suit. Beckman's no-goodnik law firm Roth & Bowles retaliate with volleys of counterclaims, metric tons of irrelevant evidence and an array of tactical harassment. Other parties strike back violently--an angry ex-wife with all the dirt on Beckman is gunned down before Rachel's eyes. Rachel's lawyer boyfriend, Jonathan Wolf, investigates Missouri's neo-Nazis for the state attorney general; he ties the gunmen to a skinhead group called the Spider. When Rachel, her law professor pal Benny and his students plow through boxes of Beckman info, they discover a six-firm cabal dating back to the 1940s, when an undercover Jewish activist kept tabs on St. Louis's powerful anti-Semites. Could the cabal be linked to the Spider as well? Though much of the plot involves library research, Kahn (a St. Louis lawyer himself) renders it all exciting; what could be bookish tedium becomes a treasure hunt over perilous ground and a chance to look at some of the stranger, darker parts of real Midwestern history. Kahn (Death Benefits; Grave Designs) makes civil law seem almost glamorous. Rachel must confront huge corporations, take on a hostile judge who favors the well-heeled, outmaneuver violent white supremacists and meanwhile try to maintain a love life. Rachel and Jonathan's differing brands of Judaism flesh out both their characters--and give their romance some comedy, since Jonathan's Orthodox beliefs forbid premarital sex. Though neither his prose nor his people transcend their genre, Kahn's likable characters and well-managed plots make this entertaining read a solid addition to its series.

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  • English

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