Cathy Pickens Done Gone Wrong

Done Gone Wrong

Cathy Pickens

St. Martin's, Nov 2005, $23.95, 304 pp.

ISBN 0312343094

Knowing the expert witness was lying, defense attorney Avery Andrews goaded him into saying things which caused a mistrial. Still Avery lost her job and returned home to Dacus, to figure out what she is going to do with her life, when Charlotte attorney Jake Baker asks her to help him with a class action suit against a pharmaceutical company. The plaintiffs claim that the anti-depressant Uplift, made by Perforce Pharmaceuticals, caused a man to go on a killing spree before he committed suicide.

While Avery is helping Jake prepare for trial, she agrees to meet with Dr. Mark Tilman, who she knows from Dacus. He stands her up, but later she learns he was killed in a car accident that might be a hit and run. When his house burns down and a notebook he sent to his girlfriend is given to Avery, she begins to think that a drug study he was involved in got him killed. When one of the patients in the study is found dead, Avery decides to investigate, and almost becomes a victim herself.

Fans of southern down home regional mysteries will want to read DONE GONE WRONG, a legal thriller that paints a frightening pictures of greedy doctors and tainted drug trials. The courtroom scenes are exciting, even though Avery is more of an observer than a participant, and her inability to forget about the dead doctor and his deceased patient, shows that she is a moral person who likes to right wrongs. It will be interesting to see what her next case will be like, and if she decides to go into partnership with Jake, or opens a practice in her hometown.