Courtroom Drama

With his usual adroitness at adapting to economic realities, Haller is currently specializing in the booming field of real estate foreclosure defense. (From where he sits, it’s “the only growth industry in the law business” in Los Angeles.) But he finds himself back in criminal court when Lisa Trammel, a client in defiance of a foreclosure notice, is accused of murdering the bank executive in charge of taking her house.

Hotheaded Lisa is a handful, having picketed the bank, spooked the banker and inspired other foreclosure victims to join her protest. Haller, though, has a sneaking suspicion that his most flamboyant “nuisance client” might not be guilty of murder. “That wasn’t like me, to believe in innocence,” he confesses. But “idealism dies hard,” and Haller pulls together a defense team to take on her case, which turns into a media circus after Lisa signs up with an opportunistic producer intent on selling her story to the movies.

Haller is the kind of slick, cynical showman who can’t resist making high drama out of every routine legal procedure. He arranges a closed-bid art auction to serve a subpoena on a resistant witness, rigs a photo trick to break down solid eyewitness testimony and takes a mannequin into court to illustrate a dubious defense point.

“It was all strategy and games,” he confesses, “and I had to admit it was the best part of a trial.” But Connelly is himself a master manipulator, and there’s always something deadly serious behind his entertaining courtroom high jinks. Here he describes the background of the real estate collapse, exposing the venality involved in mortgage foreclosures. And just to keep it light, he throws in a few inside jokes about Hollywood hustlers and the things they’ll do to get their hands on a hot property.

DRAWING CONCLUSIONS (Atlantic Monthly, $24), Donna Leon’s 20th Venetian mystery featuring her compassionate police detective, Commissario Guido Brunetti, epitomizes what we treasure most about this series: a feeling for the life of a sublimely beautiful city and a sensitivity to the forces that are reshaping it. Not to mention the pleasure of being in Brunetti’s company when this shrewd but scrupulously honest man is having a crisis of ethics at the flower market or trying to pry information from a hostile nun.

Brunetti’s close scrutiny of the modest apartment where an elderly widow has just died opens this investigation into two types of silent victims, abused women and old people living and dying alone. According to a resident of the nursing home where the widow volunteered her time, she was “a good woman” who “understood things. Why people do things,” but whose inflexible sense of right and wrong may have caused her death. This offends Brunetti, who is distressed to think that the Venetian tolerance of corruption — about which he himself is profoundly ambivalent — has made it a liability for a decent person to maintain a commitment to justice.

Yashim, the eunuch investigator in Jason Goodwin’s sumptuous mysteries set in 19th-century Istanbul, is often away from the palace on royal assignments. That alone adds to the exotic allure of the intimate views of harem life in AN EVIL EYE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26), which opens with the death of Sultan Mahmut II and the pandemonium in the seraglio when his 16-year-old successor arrives at the palace with his own harem. “We’re the pretty girls,” the newcomers taunt the older women scrambling to gather up their children and salvage a few possessions to take into exile. But in the thrill of the moment, two of the new girls insult the late sultan’s sister and unleash what some palace residents fear is a curse. Russian designs on the Ottoman Empire add political dimensions to the plot and heighten the dangers of Yashim’s investigation. But those nasty Russians have a lot to learn from the devious ladies in the seraglio.

In Lori Roy’s haunting first novel, BENT ROAD (Dutton, $25.95), Arthur Scott tries to escape the volatile racial climate of Detroit in 1967 by moving his wife and three children to the tiny Kansas town he left after the violent death of his sister 25 years earlier. Writing with a delicate touch but great strength of purpose, Roy creates stark studies of the prairie landscape and subtle portraits of the Scotts as they struggle to adjust not only to their rural surroundings but to their troublesome relatives and taciturn neighbors. While Arthur seems to thrive in this environment, the younger children are tormented at school and his wife, who no longer wears her pearls to church, is most aware of how they have all coarsened and accepted the brutish values of this alien world. At the end of this Gothic nightmare, the Scotts have been exposed to more violence and suffering than they ever were in big, bad Detroit.