Ken Behar practiced law for more than forty years. He served as a Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General and was a co-founding partner of a boutique Boston law firm specializing in health care law. He lives with his wife and their dog in Lexington, Massachusetts.
City of Cambridge homicide detectives Barney Freedman and Herb McCauley are assigned to investigate the 1998 murders of the assistant district attorney and child psychologist instrumental in obtaining the 1984 conviction of Raymond “Pokey” Parker, a day care center owner charged with sexually abusing ten children under his care. Parker, who died in prison in 1996, maintained his innocence and claimed at trial that the children testifying against him had been influenced by improper suggestion and undue pressure. The detectives’ investigation focuses on five close high school friends (presently college sophomores) who do not remember testifying at the trial or anything about the case. The five friends do their own investigation into the Parker trial when one of them reads Parker’s 1996 obituary and the name Pokey stirs a faint memory. The friends receive no help from their parents and some unsuccessfully try hypnotism to recover repressed memories. Memory may be read as two “who-done-its”—was Parker guilty and who killed the leading figures in the Parker case prosecution?
When 2013 dawns, the law firm of Carpenter, Sullivan, Jeffries & Boyle begins its second year and struggles to obtain new business. Carpenter and Philly’s new partners, Simon Jeffries and Rachel Boyle, land another law school as a client; the Sloan-Webster School of Law is being sued by three graduates who claim the law school’s placement office was ineffective and had failed to place anyone. Carpenter is referred two cases by a grateful client: a businessman seeking to enforce his father’s promise to let him run the family business, and a company president claiming that his company was overcharged by a large law firm representing the company in the sale of its business. As 2013 unfolds, added to the pressure on the firm to obtain new business is a proposal by a law firm specializing in business transactions that the two firms merge. The merger proposal particularly troubles Carpenter who had never considered practicing law with non-litigators or at a firm where his name might not be on the door.
Copyright © 2023 Ken Behar – All Rights Reserved.