Fifty-Fifty

Two sisters call the police on the same night, and each names the other as their father's killer. Alexandra and Sofia Avellino accuse one another of stabbing Frank Avellino, a former New York City mayor, in his Manhattan apartment. He dies of his wounds, and both daughters are charged with the same murder.

Defense attorney Eddie Flynn takes Sofia's case. Across the courtroom, Kate Brooks represents Alexandra with equal conviction that her own client is innocent. As the joint trial opens, the evidence implicates each sister in turn, and neither lawyer can fully rule out that their own client did it. Digging into the family's history, Flynn learns that both sisters were abused by their mother, Jane Marsden, years before Frank's death.

Chapters move between Flynn, Brooks and an unnamed narrator known only as she, whose account withholds the killer's identity even as further deaths follow. The structure turns the courtroom case into a genuine puzzle: one sister is guilty, one is not, and the odds sit at fifty-fifty until the verdict.

It is the fifth novel in the Eddie Flynn series, a courtroom thriller that reads as a self-contained case for a reader new to the character.