Michael Kahn's quirky series of legal thrillers featuring attorney Rachel Gold and set in St. Louis combines local color, sly humor, fast-paced action, and clever plots in one guaranteed engrossing and enjoyable package.
Since Kahn has a full-time day job as an attorney specializing in intellectual property rights, fans have to wait patiently for the appearance of each book in the series, but it's always worth the wait. The Flinch Factor is another winner.
In her previous outing, Rachel became engaged to be married; in this book, she is a very recent widow with a small child and two teenage step-daughters she has taken under her wing. She's also in the middle of a lawsuit, representing a working-class neighborhood trying to fight off a developer who is asking the city for eminenet domain and tax increment financing to redevelop this "blighted area" as a swanky gated community. It appears to be a lost cause, since the city and the developer have the law on their side, so Rachel's last hope is the judge that has been assigned to hear the suit; a judge so notoriously flakey he's known to the entire St. Louis legal community as "The Flinch Factor."
Then Rachel reluctantly agrees to take on another hopeless case: the strange death of Nick Moran, a local contractor adored by every woman whose house he has remodeled. Nick was found dead of a drug overdose in his truck, parked in an isolated area notorious for gay hook-ups, so the police came to the obvious conclusion. But Nick's younger sister is convinced her brother was neither gay nor a drug user.
When Rachel begins digging into the case she finds various bits of evidence that just don't add up to an accidental death. And to her surprise, she discovers a number of connections between Nick's death and the developer in her lost cause lawsuit. Too many connections, in Rachel's opinion, to qualify as coincidence.
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