Tess Monaghan lost her job as a reporter when her newspaper downsized. Since then she's spent a lot of time feeling bad about the loss of her career, but has made no real effort to find another one. She pays her bills by working part time at her aunt's bookstore and doing free-lance research for an uncle who works as a mid-level state bureaucrat. The rest of her life is as much of a disaster as her career. She has few friends and her love life consists of the occasional booty call with an ex-boyfriend, who's cheating on his current girlfriend with Tess. The only real structure in Tess' life is her commitment to rowing every morning on the Patapsco river.
One day friend and fellow rower Darryl Paxton, aka Rock, asks for Tess' help tailing his fiance Ava. She's a lawyer with a prestigious local firm but Rock fears that her job isn't the only thing occupying her time. Tess feels bad about taking money from a friend, but she needs it to pay her bills and he's determined to pursue the investigation so she agrees to take the job. Tess soon has reason to believe that Rock's suspicions were correct and Ava is sleeping with her boss, Michael Abramowich. In an attempt to be kind Tess offers Ava a chance to come clean on her own, but instead of admitting to having an affair she tells Rock that Abramowich is sexually harassing her.
Abramowich has only been with the firm for a short time. Before that he had a private practice doing criminal defense. He was famous for his tacky commercials, which made him a running joke all over Baltimore. Numerous people had reason to hate him, but when he's murdered Darryl is the prime suspect and is soon under arrest. Tess' testimony could seriously hurt him at trial so his lawyer makes her part of his defense team so that her work will be covered by lawyer-client privilege. She's supposed to do only what she's told, but she can't stop herself from digging into Abramowich's past in an attempt to save her friend from going to prison.
This book had the obvious signs of being a first novel. The mystery was interesting, but the pacing was uneven and some parts of the plot didn't fully hang together. Worse, this was one of those frustrating books where the plot is driven by the failure of any of the characters to ask the obvious question about the crime. In this case the question was, "Why would a prestigious law firm with a high-end client base hire a man whose commercials are a local joke?" As a former reporter Tess should know what to ask about a story, so her failure to do so didn't exactly fill me with confidence in her future as an investigator.
I also found it somewhat difficult to sympathize with Rock because he was written in an inconsistent way that made it difficult to know who he was. He's presented as a big dumb jock—--too dumb to realize that his fiance is a lying user. Tess even compares him to Lenny from Of Mice & Men. The problem with that is that Rock's day job is as a medical researcher at John's Hopkins. His father wanted him to be a doctor, but that would have taken too much time away from rowing so he stuck with research. Not exactly a job for a dim bulb.
I also found Tess somewhat difficult to like. She lost her job two years ago and is still just drifting. If she were making an effort to figure out her future it would be different, but she's basically just living off the generosity of her family and feeling sorry for herself. I also hated that her relationship with her ex-boyfriend was such a cliché. He's the standard lousy guy she can't, or at least doesn't, resist who's cheating on his girlfriend with her. I'm not a fan of cheaters, so that lost Tess some major points.
Grade: C-
Will I read the next book in the series?: No. I didn't like this one well enough to add it to my list of series to follow.
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