Steel City Confidential

A lawyer defends a woman she knows is innocent from one murder and then the woman is charged with another murder she is innocent of.

Rochelle “Ro” Rabinowitz, attorney-at-law, gets assigned a pro bono case for the defense of a woman who is charged with murdering a professor of her pregnant daughter. Pam Wilson, a 62-year-old woman, claims she is innocent and she has an alibi. Pam is a hard-working cashier during the day and she cleans bathrooms at a bar under the table at night to help pay for her dying wife's, Charlotte, chemo treatments, and her daughter's medical bills while Maddie goes to graduate school. Ro and her team quickly find out that not everything is as simple as it seems as another murder occurs which is linked to Pam. A secret comes out about the professor and his activities with Maddie and other students. He had more than one visitor the night he was killed. Maddie finds her biological father and opens up yet another box of buried secrets and yet another murdered body. As the charges pile up and Pam stops talking other than to say she is innocent, Ro and her team race against time as Charlotte's time is running out, Maddie is about to go into labor, and Pam is facing the death sentence.

Attention: spoilers ahead!!!!

I do not usually write reviews with spoilers in them, but in this case it is a little hard not to as this book asks you to suspend an important belief if you are a movie fan. Anne Hagan was challenged to write this book and someone suggested that she take a famous movie and change the ending and she did. She took one of my all time favorite movies of which I have had many discussions about and even had a class on where we debated the movie and the themes in it. Needless to say in Steel City Confidential (2019), Hagan's first book in the “Steel City Series” it is pretty obvious from the get-go which movie and if you are a huge fan you might shake your head through those parts and have to really suspend your belief and ideas to accept her story-line.

How did I do? Did I give too much away? The mix of mysteries, legalese, and drama is handled with finesse by Hagan. I do find the relationship between Ro and her wife to be a complete mystery because so far they seem to have nothing in common nor do they spend any time doing anything that Ro wants to do. It does not seem as if there is even any chemistry between them. Ro's relationship with her team is explained better than with her wife and one can feel the dynamics between all of them. There are some open story-lines which I assume will either be in Steel City 2 or 3 and I hope to see the mysteries solved as this is where Hagan excelled. The lesbian relationships were paper relationships. As for the ending, once again, I really do not want to give anything away, but it contradicts what Hagan has set up in the book by going back to the movie. I want to read the next book because the legal thriller was really good and that is what I would concentrate on in this series. See you at the next bang of the gavel....