Kindle County

One afternoon in late March, Sandy Stern, a brilliant, quixotic defence lawyer, returns home to find his wife Clara dead in the garage. They had been married for thirty-one years. Her suicide note leaves him just four words: 'Can you forgive me?' But on 6 March, Clara had expected to live...

Rusty is a retired judge attempting a third act in life with a loving soon-to-be wife, Bea, with whom he shares both a restful home on an idyllic lake in the rural Midwest and a plaintive hope that this marriage will be his best, and his last. But the peace that's taken Rusty so long to find evaporates when Bea's young adult son, Aaron, living under their supervision while on probation for drug possession, disappears. If Aaron doesn't return soon, he will be sent back to jail.

It was another drive-by shooting in one of Kindle County's most drug-plagued housing projects - but the victim was the ex-wife of a politician. Now this explosive case is about to reunite an unlikely group of men and women who first bonded in the revolutionary fires of the 1960s...and show a once-crusading female judge, driven by both her fears and her courage, just how devastating a single wrong choice can be.

Life would seem to have gone well for George Mason. His days as a criminal defense lawyer are long behind him. At 59, he has sat as a judge on the Court of Appeals in Kindle County for nearly a decade. Yet, when a disturbing rape case is brought before him, the judge begins to question the very nature of the law and his role within it. What is troubling George Mason so deeply? Is it his wife's recent diagnosis? Or the strange and threatening e-mails he has started to receive?

Twenty years ago, Tommy Molto charged his colleague Rusty Sabich with the murder of a former lover; when a shocking turn of events transformed Prosecutor Rusty from the accuser into the accused. Rusty was cleared, but the seismic trial left both men reeling. Molto’s name was dragged through the mud and while Rusty regained his career, he lost much more.

The Gianis's and the Kronons. Two families entangled in a long and complex history of love and deceit... Twenty five years ago, after a society picnic held by businessman and politician Zeus Kronon, Zeus' headstrong daughter Dita was found murdered. Her boyfriend, Cass Gianis, confessed to the crime. Now Cass has been released from prison into the care of his twin, Mayoral candidate Paul Gianis, who is in the middle of a high profile political campaign.