Review: Hostile Witness by Rebecca Forster

Hostile Witness by Rebecca Forster

Josie Bates was a hotshot defense attorney who won a difficult case only to have the defendant prove later to have been guilty at the cost of new lives. Shaken by her role in enabling the new tragedy, Bates has withdrawn from criminal defense work, but gets pulled back in when her old college roommate begs her to defend her daughter who is being prosecuted for setting a fire that killed a popular California judge who happens to be the father of the girl’s stepfather. No one seems to want to help Josie defend the girl and the stepfather is actually a prosecution witness against the girl.

 

The setting is bleak, and as you would expect from a novel in this genre, the actual circumstances of the crime are much more complicated and twisted than anyone realizes. This is a mystery about family relationships and the secrets within the family. But what’s not clear as the case advances is whether or not the weird family dynamics will justify the fire and the death, or prove the girl innocent.

 

Complicating the whole novel is that the governor of California wants to appoint the stepfather to fill the dead man’s seat on the judicial bench. Forster obviously wanted this to add tension to the trial but it was not realistic. There is no way the trial would have started before the decision of whether to confirm the stepfather as a judge was made or not and I thought that rushing the trial so that it was an issue damaged the credibility of the story.

 

If you liked this review, you can find more at www.gilbertstack.com/reviews.