A trial built as a trap.
Daniel Reyes is one of the best trial lawyers in the state. Cold, brilliant, a little feared. No one knows that everything he has built was aimed at a single man: Judge Aaron Vance, the judge who buried his innocent father in the system twenty years ago and then let him die there.
Now Vance is presiding over Danny's newest case, the defense of a frightened young man accused of murder. Danny didn't get the assignment by chance. He engineered it, patiently, brick by brick, and he intends to use the trial itself as the instrument of his revenge, right there in the judge's own courtroom, where every polite word will carry a second meaning only the two of them can hear.
But the deeper Danny digs into the past, the darker the truth becomes. A planted glove. A silenced detective. A death in prison that was never a heart attack.