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    The Best Defense
    The Best Defense
    The Best Defense
    Ebook33 pages27 minutes

    The Best Defense

    By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

    ()

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    About this ebook

    John Lundgren loves the challenge of defending his clients. As a public defender in the great city of Chicago, he defends them all: the guilty, the not-so-guilty, and the bug-eyed crazy.

    But when he gets assigned Richard Palmer, a highly intelligent man accused of an impossible arson and horrific mass murder, he soon discovers this case will challenge him like no other—just not in any way he ever expected. 

    "[Rusch's] short fiction is golden."

    —The Kansas City Star

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWMG Publishing
    Release dateJun 6, 2018
    ISBN9781386483465
    The Best Defense
    Author

    Kristine Kathryn Rusch

    USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award. She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.  She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

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      Book preview

      The Best Defense - Kristine Kathryn Rusch

      The Best Defense

      The Best Defense

      Kristine Kathryn Rusch

      WMG Publishing Inc.

      Contents

      The Best Defense

      Newsletter sign-up

      Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

      About the Author

      The Best Defense

      They tell me time has no meaning here. I sit cross-legged in a glade, surrounded by willow trees and strong oak and all sorts of green plants I don’t recognize. Flowers bloom out of season—roses next to tulips next to mums. The air is warm, the breeze is fresh, and I have never felt more trapped in my life.

      Except when I was in law school.

      Third year, sitting in my carrel in the law library, various teas stacked around the top, hiding me from the other students. I’d spend a few hours digging through some musty old tomes to find one little nugget of information that might help my hypothetical client or, failing that, impress some stupid professor, all the while wondering if I should just drop out.

      Escape.

      Pretend the past three years of Aristotelian logic and Socratic debate had never happened at all.

      Now I have tea at my fingertips—all I have to do is snap them and some scantily clad nymph pours me a cup—and all the food I want (oh, yeah: that’s the thing they don’t tell you: never eat the food), and it doesn’t matter.

      I’m still digging through tomes, trying to find something to get my client off. He’s not so hypothetical any more. Although I am going to have to impress a few people.

      People I don’t really want to impress.

      People who may not be people at all.

      I only caught the case because I didn’t escape quickly enough from Judge Lewandowski’s courtroom. I’d been there to argue against remand for a repeater, even though I knew all of Chicagoland would be better off if he went

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