Shelly Trotter, the daughter of the state’s governor and a children’s-rights advocate, is thrust into a world in which she’s completely unschooled-the criminal court. The defendant is a seventeen-year-old former client who is accused of killing a cop. Shelly soon learns that this boy was caught in the middle of an undercover operation to trap corrupt officers. But what was his role in the sting? The target or the bait? And what does the prosecution really have against him?
Then comes the shocker: The kid says he is the son she gave up in a private adoption kept hush-hush by her father, who had political ambitions beyond their small town. As the evidence mounts, Shelly finds that nothing—not legal ethics, not her father’s reelection campaign—will stop her from keeping her son off death row—for with this client, she is truly a jury of one.