An Innocent Client (joe Dillard, #1)

Joe Dillard is a forty-year-old criminal defense lawyer in northeast Tennessee, deeply disillusioned with defending guilty clients. On his birthday, he finalizes a plea deal for Johnny Wayne Neal, who hired two men to stab his young wife to death after taking out $350,000 in life insurance policies on her. At the courthouse, Johnny Wayne enters his guilty plea before Judge Ivan Glass, a vindictive judge who assigns Joe punishing cases as retaliation for Joe's lawsuit against the county. As Joe leaves, he makes a birthday wish: just one innocent client before he quits the law.

Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) Special Agent Phillip Landers, a vain and self-serving investigator, examines the murder of Reverend John Paul Tester, a traveling evangelist found stabbed to death at a local motel with his penis removed. Landers traces Tester's movements to the Mouse's Tail, a strip club owned by Erlene Barlowe, a shrewd widow in her fifties. Erlene denies recognizing Tester but inadvertently references a "murder" before Landers has used that word, revealing she knows more than she admits.

Joe's wife, Caroline Dillard, who serves as his paralegal, visits Joe's older sister, Sarah Dillard, at the county jail. Sarah is finishing a sentence for forging checks to buy cocaine. Caroline urges Sarah to live with the family upon release, but Sarah, who has struggled with addiction her entire life, refuses. She later changes her mind and appears on the family's porch during Joe's birthday celebration with Caroline, their son Jack, and their daughter Lilly.

Erlene instructs her employees to deny Tester visited the club, excluding Angel Christian, a young waitress she regards as a surrogate daughter. Angel resembles the deceased daughter of Erlene's late husband, Gus Barlowe, and Erlene has become fiercely protective of her. Julie Hayes, a dancer with a cocaine addiction, questions the cover-up but complies. Landers discovers Tester withdrew money from the club's ATM, confirming Erlene lied. During a raid, only Julie cooperates, reporting that Tester harassed Angel and that Erlene and Angel left through the back door after Tester departed. Julie also reports that Erlene's red Corvette disappeared the day after the murder.

During a visit to his mother at a nursing home, where she has advanced Alzheimer's disease, Joe confesses aloud a secret he has carried for decades: When he was eight and Sarah was nine, their Uncle Raymond raped Sarah while babysitting them. Joe witnessed the assault and tried to intervene but was overpowered and threatened into silence. He identifies this trauma as the root of both siblings' lifelong struggles.

After Angel is arrested for first-degree murder, Erlene hires Joe with a $250,000 cash retainer. Joe visits Angel in jail and finds her childlike, with no trace of aggression. She denies killing Tester, and her plea for help triggers a flashback to Sarah's childhood cries for protection. Joe agrees to take the case. At the arraignment, Joe publicizes that Tester spent his last night at a strip club, undermining public sympathy for the victim. Tester's adult son, John Paul Tester Jr., a deputy sheriff who idolized his father, threatens Angel and Joe in the courtroom and is briefly arrested.

As Joe prepares for trial, crises converge. Sarah steals Lilly's car and Caroline's necklace, wrecks the car, and is arrested. Glass sentences her to six years. Junior Tester stalks Joe's family and rams Joe's truck off an embankment into Boone Lake. Joe survives and retaliates by ambushing Junior at midnight, breaking his shin and warning him to stay away. Junior cries that Joe "took my daddy" from him: Joe's courtroom disclosures about Tester Sr.'s behavior at the strip club shattered Junior's idealized image of his father.

Joe's investigator, Diane Frye, a retired state trooper, uncovers Angel's real identity: Mary Ann Rhodes, born in Columbus, Ohio, and adopted by a couple in Oklahoma who subjected her to years of sexual and physical abuse. Forensic psychiatrist Tom Short diagnoses Angel with severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and theorizes she could have killed in a dissociative state, but this defense requires Angel to admit the killing. In a separate case, Joe represents Maynard Bush, a career criminal who manipulates Joe into arranging jail visits that facilitate a violent escape during which two bailiffs are killed. Joe feels partly responsible.

Julie Hayes, the prosecution's key witness, is found dead, poisoned by cocaine laced with strychnine. With the case weakened, District Attorney Deacon Baker offers Angel a plea deal reducing the charge to aggravated assault with probation. Angel initially accepts but reverses course at the hearing, apparently at Erlene's urging. Around the same time, Joe's mother dies, plunging him into severe depression.

The trial begins with a thin circumstantial case: two hairs matching Angel's DNA found on Tester's shirt, a bruise on Angel's face, and testimony from Sarah. Landers has recruited Sarah as a jailhouse informant, drafting a false statement claiming Angel confessed to the murder and offering Sarah early release for signing it. During the trial, an anonymous tip leads Landers to Erlene's red Corvette hidden in a locked barn, which contains bloodstains. The judge grants a one-week recess.

During the recess, Angel privately confesses the truth to Joe: Erlene devised a plan to drug and rob Tester at his motel room, but when Angel entered, Tester punched her and sodomized her. Angel entered a dissociative state and stabbed him repeatedly with his own knife. Erlene found Angel on the stairs afterward, cleaned the scene, and later removed Tester's penis to eliminate DNA evidence of the assault. Joe recognizes this as voluntary manslaughter at worst but cannot bring himself to recommend that Angel cooperate with prosecutors.

Overwhelmed by accumulated trauma, Joe breaks down and confesses everything to Caroline for the first time, including Sarah's rape, his combat experiences as an Army Ranger during the 1983 US invasion of Grenada, and his anguish over Angel's case. Caroline reassures him. Joe then visits Sarah in jail, apologizes for failing to protect her from Raymond, and the siblings reconcile. Sarah signals she intends to tell the truth on the stand rather than repeat Landers's fabricated statement.

When the trial resumes, the prosecution's case collapses. Joe dismantles each piece of evidence, and Sarah, the prosecution's final witness, recants the false statement. She testifies that Landers wrote the statement before visiting her and never asked her a single question. Joe rests without calling defense witnesses, and the jury returns a not-guilty verdict in under an hour.

After the verdict, Junior Tester ambushes Joe and Caroline in the parking lot with a revolver, firing five shots. The fifth strikes Joe in the thigh. As Junior prepares to fire his final bullet, Sarge Hurley, the elderly courthouse security officer, tackles Junior from behind and knocks him unconscious. Joe's wound narrowly misses his femoral artery, and Junior is sent to a mental health facility.

Erlene is subsequently arrested for Tester's murder after his blood is found in the Corvette. She hires Joe and reveals an elaborate scheme: She orchestrated the anonymous tip that led Landers to the car, knowing he would trespass to enter the locked barn without a warrant. She had Gus's nephew Ronnie videotape the illegal search, rendering the Corvette and all evidence from it inadmissible. Joe, knowing from Angel's confession that Erlene did not kill Tester, recognizes Erlene as truly his innocent client and agrees to represent her.