<p> The echoes of a murder reach deep into the halls of the U.S. Supreme Court in this electrifying new thriller featuring defense attorney Paul Madriani from <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author Steve Martini. </p> <p> Terry Scarborough is a legal scholar and provocateur who craves headline-making celebrity, but with his latest book he may have gone too far. In it he resurrects forgotten language in the U.S. Constitution&#151;and hints at a missing letter of Thomas Jefferson's&#151;that threatens to divide the nation. Then Scarborough is brutally murdered and a young man with dark connections is charged. What looks like an open-and-shut case to most people, doesn't to defense attorney Paul Madriani. He believes there is much more to the case, and that the defendant is a pawn caught in the middle, being scapegoated by circumstance. </p> <p> As the trial spirals toward its conclusion, Madriani and his partner Harry Hinds race to find the missing Jefferson letter&#151;and the secrets it holds about slavery and scandal at the time of our nation's founding and the very reason Scarborough was killed. Madriani's chase takes him from the tension-filled courtroom in California to the trail of a Supreme Court justice now suddenly in hiding and lays bare the soaring political stakes for a seat on the High Court, in a country divided, and under the shadow of power. </p>