Dirty Blonde

Cate Fante has just been appointed to the federal bench in Philadelphia, a hard-charging woman with working-class roots from a Pennsylvania coal-mining town who never quite fits in among the elite she now joins. To cope with the loneliness and pressure of her new life, she leads a secret double existence, slipping into seedy bars to pick up rough, anonymous men. When two parties tied to a high-profile intellectual-property case she presides over meet violent ends in the wake of her ruling, Cate finds herself drawn into the circle of suspicion. The pressure escalates sharply when her hidden private life is exposed and splashed across the newspapers, putting her career, her reputation, and possibly her freedom in jeopardy. With everything she has built collapsing around her, Cate has no choice but to investigate the killings herself and unmask the real murderer before she is destroyed. A fast-moving legal thriller, it blends courtroom intrigue with a psychologically complex portrait of a woman whose appetites and ambitions are constantly at war.