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Lucinda Hayes #2
A Suggestion of Death
In her national bestseller Render Up the Body, former federal prosecutor Marianne Wesson delivered an “intense legal drama” (Sara Paretsky). Now, Wesson’s unforgettable heroine, Colorado attorney Cinda Hayes, is the heart and soul of a thrilling and authentic new novel—a page-turner that ranks with the best suspense fiction of Scott Turow and Linda Fairstein.
The cry for help first comes over the telephone: a scared young woman with a small voice calls a radio talk show hosted by Cinda Hayes, with searching legal questions about “intimate torts.” When Cinda meets Mariah McKay in person, she encounters a troubled, delicate twenty-year-old with a shocking accusation: her father, a respected university professor and candidate for Colorado state senate, traumatized her as a child. Mariah retains only jagged pieces of her horrific memories, but with the clock ticking on the statute of limitations, Cinda cannot afford to wait. She must pursue the case with the evidence at hand.
Mariah has fled her privileged upbringing and retreated into the plains east of Boulder, where she has taken refuge among a band of people with their own political agenda—a militia group. Her chief protector is Pike Sayers, a magnetic, mysterious man who is the community’s judge of the common law. As Cinda investigates Mariah’s painful and secretive history, Sayers might be Cinda’s greatest ally—or her worst opposition. And as she deciphers the fragments of evidence, she plunges herself into danger. Someone wants to keep the past wrapped tightly in darkness, and will stop at nothing to ensure that Cinda comes up empty-handed. Under terrible pressure and mounting threats, Cinda will fight relentlessly for a desperate young woman’s chance at redemption.
Cinda Hayes touches the heart and the mind in A Suggestion of Death, a taut, provocative thriller that resonates well beyond its gripping legal suspense.
The cry for help first comes over the telephone: a scared young woman with a small voice calls a radio talk show hosted by Cinda Hayes, with searching legal questions about “intimate torts.” When Cinda meets Mariah McKay in person, she encounters a troubled, delicate twenty-year-old with a shocking accusation: her father, a respected university professor and candidate for Colorado state senate, traumatized her as a child. Mariah retains only jagged pieces of her horrific memories, but with the clock ticking on the statute of limitations, Cinda cannot afford to wait. She must pursue the case with the evidence at hand.
Mariah has fled her privileged upbringing and retreated into the plains east of Boulder, where she has taken refuge among a band of people with their own political agenda—a militia group. Her chief protector is Pike Sayers, a magnetic, mysterious man who is the community’s judge of the common law. As Cinda investigates Mariah’s painful and secretive history, Sayers might be Cinda’s greatest ally—or her worst opposition. And as she deciphers the fragments of evidence, she plunges herself into danger. Someone wants to keep the past wrapped tightly in darkness, and will stop at nothing to ensure that Cinda comes up empty-handed. Under terrible pressure and mounting threats, Cinda will fight relentlessly for a desperate young woman’s chance at redemption.
Cinda Hayes touches the heart and the mind in A Suggestion of Death, a taut, provocative thriller that resonates well beyond its gripping legal suspense.
464 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
3 people are currently reading
57 people want to read
About the author
Marianne Wesson
10 books7 followersMarianne Wesson (known to friends as Mimi) grew up in Dallas, Texas, graduated from Vassar College and the University of Texas Law School, and began teaching at the University of Colorado Law School in 1976. She lives on a ranch in Larimer County, Colorado, with her husband Ben Herr, ten llamas, various cats and dogs, and visiting elk, coyotes, and bears.
As a scholar, Mimi is best known for her contributions to the debate about pornography in feminism and law; her work on the subject has been published in law reviews as well as in more popular publications such as The Women’s Review of Books. Pornography and its relationship to free speech and to our troubled culture is the subject of her newest book, Chilling Effect. She has published many academic articles over the years, as well as a treatise about the Colorado Criminal Code called Crimes and Defenses in Colorado (which she believes nobody has ever actually read from cover to cover). Her principal teaching interests are criminal law, evidence, trial practice, and law and literature. Mimi's teaching has been honored with the Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Colorado three times; she has also been named a President's Teaching Scholar, the University's highest form of recognition for teaching excellence. She holds the Wolf-Nichol Fellowship at the Law School, a position set aside to honor teaching achievement. She also served as Interim Dean of the Law School in 1995-96, an experience that persuaded her once and for all that academic administration is not her calling.
Mimi is an experienced trial lawyer as well. In 1980, after four years of teaching, she took a leave of absence to serve for two years as a federal prosecutor in the Office of the United States Attorney in Denver. During those years she tried many federal criminal cases, including kidnapping, firearms and explosives cases, extortion, and white collar crimes. After she returned to teaching in 1982, she continued to take on occasional trial work to keep her skills from growing rusty and because nothing else has the thrill of the courtroom. In the mid-1980s she co-represented the plaintiff in Simmons v. Simmons, the first case in Colorado (and one of the first in the country) to recognize that a woman has a right to sue her former husband for abusive injuries he inflicted on her during their marriage. In 1991, Mimi was appointed by the California Supreme Court to represent a death row inmate, Jerry Grant Frye. His case is now in federal habeas corpus proceedings.
The experience of representing Jerry inspired Mimi to write her first novel, Render Up the Body, about a former prosecutor and rape victims' advocate who is appointed to represent a death row inmate. Render Up the Body is dedicated to Jerry Frye. It was published by HarperCollins in North America, Headline Press in the U.K., Goldmann Publishers in Germany, Editions Stock in France, and for other translations into Norweigan, Dutch, Portuguese, Hebrew, and Latvian. It appeared in the U.S. in January of 1998, where it was also a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a finalist for the Colorado Book Award for fiction.
Her second novel, A Suggestion of Death, was released in 1999 in the U.K., and February 2000 in the US, with various translations published in 2000 and 2001.
Chilling Effect, the third novel in the series, was published in September 2004 by the University Press of Colorado. All three novels feature protagonist Lucinda Hayes, who practices law in Boulder, Colorado.
You may have seen or heard Mimi on National Public Radio, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, or Court TV, with her observations and analysis of the trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Lynn Nichols, the Columbine shootings, the JonBenet Ramsey case, and other legal matters. She provides regular commentary to NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday.
As a scholar, Mimi is best known for her contributions to the debate about pornography in feminism and law; her work on the subject has been published in law reviews as well as in more popular publications such as The Women’s Review of Books. Pornography and its relationship to free speech and to our troubled culture is the subject of her newest book, Chilling Effect. She has published many academic articles over the years, as well as a treatise about the Colorado Criminal Code called Crimes and Defenses in Colorado (which she believes nobody has ever actually read from cover to cover). Her principal teaching interests are criminal law, evidence, trial practice, and law and literature. Mimi's teaching has been honored with the Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Colorado three times; she has also been named a President's Teaching Scholar, the University's highest form of recognition for teaching excellence. She holds the Wolf-Nichol Fellowship at the Law School, a position set aside to honor teaching achievement. She also served as Interim Dean of the Law School in 1995-96, an experience that persuaded her once and for all that academic administration is not her calling.
Mimi is an experienced trial lawyer as well. In 1980, after four years of teaching, she took a leave of absence to serve for two years as a federal prosecutor in the Office of the United States Attorney in Denver. During those years she tried many federal criminal cases, including kidnapping, firearms and explosives cases, extortion, and white collar crimes. After she returned to teaching in 1982, she continued to take on occasional trial work to keep her skills from growing rusty and because nothing else has the thrill of the courtroom. In the mid-1980s she co-represented the plaintiff in Simmons v. Simmons, the first case in Colorado (and one of the first in the country) to recognize that a woman has a right to sue her former husband for abusive injuries he inflicted on her during their marriage. In 1991, Mimi was appointed by the California Supreme Court to represent a death row inmate, Jerry Grant Frye. His case is now in federal habeas corpus proceedings.
The experience of representing Jerry inspired Mimi to write her first novel, Render Up the Body, about a former prosecutor and rape victims' advocate who is appointed to represent a death row inmate. Render Up the Body is dedicated to Jerry Frye. It was published by HarperCollins in North America, Headline Press in the U.K., Goldmann Publishers in Germany, Editions Stock in France, and for other translations into Norweigan, Dutch, Portuguese, Hebrew, and Latvian. It appeared in the U.S. in January of 1998, where it was also a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a finalist for the Colorado Book Award for fiction.
Her second novel, A Suggestion of Death, was released in 1999 in the U.K., and February 2000 in the US, with various translations published in 2000 and 2001.
Chilling Effect, the third novel in the series, was published in September 2004 by the University Press of Colorado. All three novels feature protagonist Lucinda Hayes, who practices law in Boulder, Colorado.
You may have seen or heard Mimi on National Public Radio, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, or Court TV, with her observations and analysis of the trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Lynn Nichols, the Columbine shootings, the JonBenet Ramsey case, and other legal matters. She provides regular commentary to NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 24, 2021
Gute Story mit vielen Längen und leider einer Verhandlung, die wir ein Drehbuch klang.
June 7, 2019
Well, here's a novel whose heroine who's broken up with her boyfriend but refuses to be whiny and annoying (much). Cinda, who is White, and ex-boyfriend Sam, who is Black, still love each other but realize that they are taking different roads in life. Cinda, a lawyer, wants to throw herself into a nice juicy lawsuit. Presto--in comes a young lady who has one complete set of traumatic memories from one family tragedy, plus a few more scattered memories that don't seem to fit. Under current law she needs to recover her memories in time to press charges for child abuse, if necessary. The most likely suspect would be her father, currently running for office as a Republican.
Even though she's a Democrat, Cinda heroically resists the temptation to suggest the kind of sexual abuse the girl's memories immediately call to mind, and joins a licensed therapist and a "common-law judge" from the local right-wingnut community in helping the girl remember what really happened. No, she wasn't molested by her father. Yes, the sexual act of which she got a disturbing glimpse was consensual. Yes, the traumatic part of the memory she couldn't understand involved a crime...
I particularly liked the characterization of the common-law judge. Wesson obviously doesn't want to let Cinda understand his religious or political views, yet she forces Cinda to recognize him as a good man, and work with him so much that her young client blurts out that the two of them "feel like her parents." Today's "liberals" badly need more of that kind of liberality toward those who don't share their opinions. Among Wesson's fictional Far Right group, some really are violent haters (and Cinda may become their target in a sequel--stay tuned!), while others are honest, sincere, ethical, and intelligent.
This is the novel about which I asked the community last week, where I remembered the story but had forgotten all the names. It's a murder mystery, not my favorite genre. It's above average for its genre and worth reading. What was sticking in my mind was that I read this novel about Colorado on the same weekend I was going through some real correspondence my father had saved from acquaintances who were protesting taxes out there in the Carter Administration. Dad was a Bible Maven (he made me one too) and let them persuade him to be ordained as a minister, but declined to move west and preach in "churches" that were organized purely as tax dodges. So I remembered the real names and forgot the fictitious ones from this piece of fiction about Colorado, a generation later, with fictional representatives of the next generation of tax protesters in it.
In one way this novel breaks the conventions of its genre. Although one murder mystery has been fully solved at the end, another murder has occurred, and remains unsolved. There's no room for doubt that readers are being set up to buy a sequel.
Even though she's a Democrat, Cinda heroically resists the temptation to suggest the kind of sexual abuse the girl's memories immediately call to mind, and joins a licensed therapist and a "common-law judge" from the local right-wingnut community in helping the girl remember what really happened. No, she wasn't molested by her father. Yes, the sexual act of which she got a disturbing glimpse was consensual. Yes, the traumatic part of the memory she couldn't understand involved a crime...
I particularly liked the characterization of the common-law judge. Wesson obviously doesn't want to let Cinda understand his religious or political views, yet she forces Cinda to recognize him as a good man, and work with him so much that her young client blurts out that the two of them "feel like her parents." Today's "liberals" badly need more of that kind of liberality toward those who don't share their opinions. Among Wesson's fictional Far Right group, some really are violent haters (and Cinda may become their target in a sequel--stay tuned!), while others are honest, sincere, ethical, and intelligent.
This is the novel about which I asked the community last week, where I remembered the story but had forgotten all the names. It's a murder mystery, not my favorite genre. It's above average for its genre and worth reading. What was sticking in my mind was that I read this novel about Colorado on the same weekend I was going through some real correspondence my father had saved from acquaintances who were protesting taxes out there in the Carter Administration. Dad was a Bible Maven (he made me one too) and let them persuade him to be ordained as a minister, but declined to move west and preach in "churches" that were organized purely as tax dodges. So I remembered the real names and forgot the fictitious ones from this piece of fiction about Colorado, a generation later, with fictional representatives of the next generation of tax protesters in it.
In one way this novel breaks the conventions of its genre. Although one murder mystery has been fully solved at the end, another murder has occurred, and remains unsolved. There's no room for doubt that readers are being set up to buy a sequel.
August 17, 2023
This has to be one of the most boring novels I have read. Slow, pedantic and predictable. It has moments where it seems to be gaining traction by fails to produce. Tough to finish with a moderately surprising finish. Took too much time to tell the tale
January 26, 2018
Too unintersting
Read
January 19, 2015Before I discuss this book I want to say that there will be spoilers. I really wanted to like this book. I really gave it a good try. I read the entire book even though every evening I was disappointed and frustrated. Like I said, I really wanted to like this book, but I did not. The book had plenty of potential but fell short of grasping my interest.
The main character is an attorney who begins to help a troubled young woman who has flashbacks of memories that she knew were horrible but she could not remember them in their entirety. She knew that her father was involved and only really wanted him to tell her what had happened. She filed a lawsuit against him and the story went from there.
The story involves racism, the militia, common law courts and a leprechaun. The author attempted to draw us in but spent too much time explaining why the main character was choosing to do things according to the law. It would have been best if she spent less time explaining what certain laws allows and just gave us a plot that we could enjoy.
The book was written in three chapters. The first one was 264 pages long. The second was 68 pages and the author explained why things had occurred in the last chapter which was only 7 pages long. She even killed off the girl on page 265 without even giving any warning that she was in danger. Then in the last 7 pages mentions in passing that the killer was really after the attorney.
At least give us mystery or romance. This book gave neither.
The main character is an attorney who begins to help a troubled young woman who has flashbacks of memories that she knew were horrible but she could not remember them in their entirety. She knew that her father was involved and only really wanted him to tell her what had happened. She filed a lawsuit against him and the story went from there.
The story involves racism, the militia, common law courts and a leprechaun. The author attempted to draw us in but spent too much time explaining why the main character was choosing to do things according to the law. It would have been best if she spent less time explaining what certain laws allows and just gave us a plot that we could enjoy.
The book was written in three chapters. The first one was 264 pages long. The second was 68 pages and the author explained why things had occurred in the last chapter which was only 7 pages long. She even killed off the girl on page 265 without even giving any warning that she was in danger. Then in the last 7 pages mentions in passing that the killer was really after the attorney.
At least give us mystery or romance. This book gave neither.
January 21, 2010
I really like this author and, of course, her characters. Lawyer Cinda Hayes and her friends and associates continue in this second novel. Like most law stories the details can be difficult but Wesson makes them easy to understand and her descriptions of the Colorado landscape are lovely. The plot is full of surprizes and brings in many situations to puzzle about. Like the first novel, "Render Up the Body" this one does not end with a glow--but maybe it does-------.
January 24, 2013
lt was one of those fast reads. this author puts her words together well.
l found l couldnt put it down.
l found l couldnt put it down.
November 5, 2022
What a pointless book. Meanders for 350 pages then the client dies, making the case--and the book--without purpose. There are far better ways to spend a few evenings, including watching paint dry.
November 2, 2013
I was ready to put this book down but when I finished the book I was glad I stuck with it.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews