Elusive Wisdom

Having suffered the first trial loss of his career, Daniel Dermot O’Neil, a San Francisco civil trial lawyer, licks his wounds and tries to recover. Three years later, he receives a telephone call from the Sheriff of a rural Mississippi County. A woman has been murdered in her home and has left an envelope on which O’Neil’s name and address appears. The decedent, he realizes, was the foreperson on the jury in that case [Pavlone] he tried and lost three years before. He travels to Mississippi to open the envelope. It contains a copy of many canceled checks made out to the deceased for large sums and a small, black and white photograph that provides a compelling clue as to the reason for the checks, if not the murder. O’Neil is enlisted by the Mississippi Attorney General to help solve the murder, as it may be connected to other murders involving various Mississippi law enforcement.

Although highly improbable, the evidence mounts that the murder victim was bribed for her vote in the Pavlone case. A relentless and dangerous pursuit of answers leads to an enigmatic supposed ‘insurance adjuster’. Carrying standard insurance approaches to an extreme, this adjuster shows up in high stakes cases where there are catastrophic injuries caused by defectively designed products.

The pursuit of answers and of justice takes O’Neil around the country. His dogged quest is nearly sidetracked by a brilliant, beautiful woman of diverse ancestry – a woman he cannot relinquish. Ultimately, he must let his life long friend, Joe Cleary, actually try the civil case that extracts the fortunes and the licenses of the principal players that had managed to escape criminal prosecution.