The Guilty Plea

With "The Guilty Plea," a gripping sequel to the international bestseller "Old City Hall," Robert Rotenberg has delivered another sharp, suspenseful legal thriller with an explosive conclusion.

On the morning his high-profile divorce trial is set to begin, Terrance Wyler, the youngest son of Toronto's Wyler Food dynasty, is found stabbed to death in the kitchen of his luxurious home. Detective Ari Greene arrives minutes before the press and finds Wyler's four-year-old son asleep upstairs. Hours later, when Wyler's wife, Samantha, shows up at her lawyer's office with a bloody knife wrapped in a towel, the case looks like a straightforward guilty plea.

Instead, an open-and-shut case becomes a complex murder trial, full of spite and uncertainty. There's April Goodling, the Hollywood starlet with whom Terrance had a well-publicized dalliance, and Brandon Legacy, the teenage neighbor who was with Samantha the night of the murder. After a series of devastating cross-examinations, there's no telling where the jury's sympathies will lie.

As in "Old City Hall," Rotenberg's gift for twists and turns is always astonishing, but his true star remains the courtroom: the tension, disclosures, and machinations that drive this trial straight to its unpredictable verdict.