In this page-turner by High-powered, twenty-eight-year-old defense attorney Amanda Travis likes several things: the colour black, lunchtime Spin classes at the fitness centre on Clematis Street in downtown Palm Beach; her all-white one-bedroom, oceanfront condo; a compliant jury; men whose wives don’t understand them. Some of the things she doesn’t like: the colour pink; when the temperature outside her condo’s floor-to-ceiling windows falls below sixty-five degrees; clients who don’t follow her advice; being asked to show I.D. when she goes to a bar; nicknames of any shape or size. Something else Amanda Travis doesn’t like: memories. But when Ben, the first of her two ex-husbands, calls from her hometown of Toronto with the alarming news that her mother has shot and killed a man in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel, it becomes more and more difficult for Amanda to continue running from her past. Now she must return to face her demons and the life she left behind--a love that once consumed her and a mother who holds a strange, dark power over everyone she encounters. But now Amanda is determined to fight her mother’s fatal whims--even if it kills her.

Autorentext
JOY FIELDING is the New York Times bestselling author of Jenny Cooper Has a Secret, The Housekeeper, All the Wrong Places, The Bad Daughter, She's Not There, Someone Is Watching, Charley's Web, Heartstopper, Mad River Road, See Jane Run and other acclaimed novels. She divides her time between Toronto and Palm Beach, Florida.

Klappentext

In this page-turner by New York Times bestselling author Joy Fielding, the life of a young, successful defense attorney is thrown into turmoil when she is called back to her hometown to defend her disturbed, estranged mother, who publicly shot and killed a man.

High-powered, twenty-eight-year-old defense attorney Amanda Travis likes several things: the colour black, lunchtime Spin classes at the fitness centre on Clematis Street in downtown Palm Beach; her all-white one-bedroom, oceanfront condo; a compliant jury; men whose wives don’t understand them.

Some of the things she doesn’t like: the colour pink; when the temperature outside her condo’s floor-to-ceiling windows falls below sixty-five degrees; clients who don’t follow her advice; being asked to show I.D. when she goes to a bar; nicknames of any shape or size.

Something else Amanda Travis doesn’t like: memories.

But when Ben, the first of her two ex-husbands, calls from her hometown of Toronto with the alarming news that her mother has shot and killed a man in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel, it becomes more and more difficult for Amanda to continue running from her past. Now she must return to face her demons and the life she left behind—a love that once consumed her and a mother who holds a strange, dark power over everyone she encounters. But now Amanda is determined to fight her mother’s fatal whims—even if it kills her.

Zusammenfassung
**NATIONAL BESTSELLER

In this page-turner by New York Times bestselling author Joy Fielding, the life of a young, successful defense attorney is thrown into turmoil when she is called back to her hometown to defend her disturbed, estranged mother, who publicly shot and killed a man.**

High-powered, twenty-eight-year-old defense attorney Amanda Travis likes several things: the colour black, lunchtime Spin classes at the fitness centre on Clematis Street in downtown Palm Beach; her all-white one-bedroom, oceanfront condo; a compliant jury; men whose wives don’t understand them.
     Some of the things she doesn’t like: the colour pink; when the temperature outside her condo’s floor-to-ceiling windows falls below sixty-five degrees; clients who don’t follow her advice; being asked to show I.D. when she goes to a bar; nicknames of any shape or size.
     Something else Amanda Travis doesn’t like: memories.
     But when Ben, the first of her two ex-husbands, calls from her hometown of Toronto with the alarming news that her mother has shot and killed a man in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel, it becomes more and more difficult for Amanda to continue running from her past. Now she must return to face her demons and the life she left behind—a love that once consumed her and a mother who holds a strange, dark power over everyone she encounters. But now Amanda is determined to fight her mother’s fatal whims—even if it kills her.

Leseprobe
**Chapter One
**
Some of the things Amanda Travis likes: the color black; lunchtime spinning classes at the fitness center on Clematis Street in downtown Palm Beach; her all-white, one-bedroom, oceanfront condo in Jupiter; a compliant jury; men whose wives don't understand them.

Some of the things she doesn't: the color pink; when the temperature outside her condo's floor-to-ceiling windows falls below sixty-five degrees; clients who don't follow her advice; the color gray; being asked to show her ID when she goes to a bar; nicknames of any shape and size.

Something else she doesn't like: bite marks.

Especially bite marks that are deep and clearly defined, even after the passing of several days; bite marks that lie like a bright purple tattoo amidst a puddle of mustard-color bruises; bite marks that are all but smiling at her from the photographs on the defense table in front of her.

Amanda shakes blond, shoulder-length hair away from her thin face and slips the offending photographs beneath a pad of lined, yellow legal paper, then picks up a pencil and pretends to be jotting down something of importance, when what she actually writes is Remember to buy toothpaste. This gesture is for the jury's benefit, in case any of them is watching. Which is doubtful. Already this morning, she's caught one of the jurors, a middle-aged man with thinning Ronald Reagan-red hair, nodding off. She sighs, drops her pencil, sits back in her chair, and pushes her lips into a pout of disapproval. Not big. Just enough to let the jury know what she thinks of the testimony being given. Which she would like them to believe is not much.

"He was yelling about something," the young woman on the witness stand is saying, one hand absently reaching up to tug at her hair. She glances toward the defense table, pulls the platinum curls away from their black roots, and twists them around square, fake fingernails. "He's always yelling about something."

Again Amanda lifts the pencil into her right hand, adds Stouffer's frozen macaroni and cheese to the impromptu list of groceries she is creating. And orange juice, she remembers, scribbling it across the page with exaggerated flourish, as if she has just remembered a key point of law. The action dislodges the pictures beneath the legal pad, so that once again the photographic impressions of her client's teeth against the witness's skin are winking up at her.

It's the bite marks that will do her in.

She might be able to fudge the facts, obfuscate the evidence, overwhelm the jury with irrelevant details and not always reasonable doubt, but there is simply no getting around those awful pictures. They will seal her client's fate and mar her perfect record, like a blemish on an otherwise flawless complexion, detracting from almost a year of sterling performances on behalf of the poor, the unlucky, and the overwhelmingly guilty.

Damn Derek Clemens anyway. Did he have to be so damn obvious?

Amanda reaches over and pats the hand of the man sitting beside her. Another salvo for the jury, although she wonders if any of them is really fooled. Surely they watch enough television to know the various tricks of the trade: the mock outrage, the sympathetic glances, the disbelieving shakes of th…