"You shouldn't be here. It's too late . . . " These, heard over the phone, were the last recorded words of successful celebrity-divorce lawyer Richard Pryce, found bludgeoned to death in his bachelor pad with a bottle of wine - a 1982 Chateau Lafite worth 3,000, to be precise. Odd, considering he didn't drink. Why this bottle? And why those words? And why was a three-digit number painted on the wall by the killer? And, most importantly, which of the...

The domestic dispute in a wealthy suburb seems like nothing unusual. The elegant blonde bleeding in the shadows doesn't want help; and the well-dressed, ingratiating man at the front door tells investigative journalist Paddy Meehan everything's fine. Then he asks her to make sure nothing appears in the paper, slipping cash into her hand. The next morning Paddy sees on TV: the blond woman had been tortured, beaten, and left to die. The untraceable...

The good: New York's Lombardo's Steak House is famous for three reasons, the menu, the clientele, and now, the gruesome murder of an infamous mob lawyer. Effortlessly, the assassin slips through the police's fingers, and his absence sparks a blaze of accusations about who ordered the hit. The bad: Seated at a nearby table, reporter Nick Daniels is conducting a once-in-a-lifetime interview with a legendary baseball bad boy. In the chaos, he accidentally...

"Benjamin Gold is damaged goods. After he cracked up in the war and was discharged into a psych ward, his rich wife dumped him. Right after that, the white-shoe law firm that never hired Jews dumped him too; without powerful in-laws, it didn't matter how many cases he won or how much he shortened his name. Unemployable as a lawyer, he wound up working as a private eye - and not exactly at the top of the profession. Drunk and anorectic, his only remaining...

"In a city where someone is murdered almost everyday, attorney Michael Abramowitz's death should be just another statistic. But the slain lawyer's notoriety --and his taste for illicit midday trysts -- make the case front page news in every local paper except the Star, which crashed and burned before Abramowitz did. A former Star reporter who knows every inch of this town, now-unemployed journalist Tess Monaghan also knows the guy the cops like for...