agency (law)

Jake Brigance is called upon to help his old friend, disgraced former attorney Mack Stafford, make his return; young death row inmate Cody Wallace has one final request just several hours before execution; two young attorney brothers, Kirk and Rusty Malloy, look to Diantha Bradshaw to help save their once prosperous firm which they inherited from their father.

Defense lawyer Andy Carpenter is reluctant to take on any more cases. He?d much rather spend his time working for his dog rescue organization, the Tara Foundation, than find himself back in a courtroom. However, when a truck carrying over seventy dogs from the South to the rescue-friendly northeast turns up with a murdered driver, Andy can?t help but get involved.

"Defense lawyer Andy Carpenter spends as much time as he can working on his true passion, the Tara Foundation, the dog rescue organization he runs. Lately, Andy has been especially involved in a county prison program where inmates help train dogs the Tara Foundation has rescued to make them more adoptable, benefiting both the dogs and the prisoners. One of the prisoners Andy has been working with is Brian Atkins, who has 18 months left on a 5-year term for fraud. Brian has been helping to train Boomer, an adorable fox terrier the Tara Foundation rescued from a neglectful owner. Brian and Boomer are clearly a terrific match. In fact, Andy hopes that Brian will adopt Boomer himself, once his sentence is up. But one day, Andy arrives at the prison to discover that Brian has used Boomer to make an ingenious escape, and man and dog are both in the wind. The next day, the man on whose testimony Brian was convicted is found murdered. Brian is caught and arrested for the crime, though he forcefully protests his innocence. Suddenly, Andy finds himself with a new client in Brian and a new dog in Boomer. And as he starts to dig deeper into the murder and the events leading up to it, Andy realizes he might be putting them all in far more danger than anyone had realized"--.

"Lawyer Andy Carpenter is surprised when Willie Millier, Andy's partner at their dog rescue operation, the Tara Foundation, calls to say the alarm has gone off at the foundation building. There has clearly been a break-in, and a dog has been stolen. All of the dogs that the Tara Foundation rescues are given collars with GPS tracking capabilities, so Andy and Willie know they'll be able to track down the missing dog. They follow the signal to a house in downtown Paterson, and sure enough, the dog is there...standing right next to a dead body. The man had been gruesomely murdered mere minutes earlier. Could it be a coincidence? Or could the dog theft somehow be connected to the killing? Andy takes the dog safely back to the foundation building, and that should be the end of it, but his curiosity--and his desire to keep the dog from further harm--won't let him stop there. Andy finds himself looking into the circumstances surrounding the break-in and the dog theft, and what he starts to uncover makes him believe that the cops may have just arrested the wrong man for the crime. Once again David Rosenfelt has written a fast-paced and clever mystery with his characteristic blend of humor, larger-than-life characters, and propulsive plotting"--.