Twisted Justice

"I'M BETTER OFF KILLING HER," HE SAID... Those offhand words come back to haunt him when his wife's found stabbed in her lover's parking garage. It seemed like a harmless enough remark at the time – the joking reaction of a wealthy man to the cost of divorce. But now he's the obvious suspect.

And his lawyer, Marc Kadella, has to tell him the other bad news. His wife was running quite the side business as a dominatrix. The husband thought she was just a lady who lunched, who'd never had a job other than the one she had when he met her – Minnesota Vikings cheerleader – but it seems she and her friends were still a hard-working squad.

The group of eight ex-cheerleaders had moved their gymnastics indoors, building a lucrative prostitution business, and his wife had developed her own specialty—along with a stash of secrets belonging to some of the most influential and powerful men in the state.

The case is a prosecutor's dream—the defendant's phone records show he went to a party, then traveled to the scene of the murder, and back to the party. So obviously open-and-shut the police haven't even bothered to look at other suspects. That leaves Marc an opening for the daring defense known in the trade as SODDI: Some Other Dude Did It.

Readers who like their mysteries smart and complex will be enthralled by Carstens' spellbinding construction of Marc's painstaking defense, which pays off like a dream, accelerating twists and turns leading to a satisfying conclusion. Guaranteed to delight fans of taut legal thrillers like those of John Grisham, Richard North Patterson, Brad Thor, John Ellsworth, and Scott Pratt.