Anne Murphy thought she'd put her unhappy past a continent behind her when she joined Philadelphia attorney Bennie Rosato's all-woman law firm. Then a friend who's housesitting for Anne is murdered in what's clearly a case of mistaken identity, and Anne realizes that the past has caught up with her and that the only way to outrun it is to catch the killer before he realizes that she's still alive. But how can Anne play dead with a high-profile case just days away from starting? The only way to pull it off is to let her new colleagues in on the secret, which would mean telling them her other secrets, too, including the fact that she's in love with opposing counsel and the probability that her client may not be as innocent as she thought he was. The author deftly weaves the threads of plot and subplot together, helped by Mary DiNunzio, Judy Carrier, and Bennie herself, the familiar and well-drawn mainstays of this lively and solidly paced series (Moment of Truth, The Vendetta Defense, Rough Justice). It's vintage Scottoline, featuring some nice touches; a little suspense, a lot of female bonding, a few pithy asides on the human condition, and a surprise in the penultimate chapter. --Jane Adams


From Publishers Weekly
New York Times bestseller Scottoline's cast of beautiful female lawyers at Philadelphia's Rosato & Associates is augmented by red-headed bombshell Anne Murphy, a woman with a secret past, who's trying to make a go of it in a new city. An intriguing character jammed into a laborious plot, Murphy toils as a career-minded loner. On a much-needed weekend away from her heavy caseload, she picks up a newspaper to read that she has been murdered by an intruder who blasted her in the face with a shotgun. Murphy knows the real victim was the woman who had agreed to feed her cat; she also knows that the murderer was likely Kevin Satorno, the stalker who nearly killed her a year earlier while she was living in Los Angeles. Murphy figures that if Satorno discovers he actually killed the wrong person, he'll continue hunting her, so she decides to play dead and enlist the help of her new colleagues at Rosato & Associates to track him down. Scottoline (The Vendetta Defense; Moment of Truth) wraps up the far-fetched action in high style, with a few predictable twists, at Philly's big outdoor Fourth of July celebration. As in her eight previous women-in-peril legal thrillers, she tempers the plot's bloodshed with a bouncy tone that some readers may find cloying. But this doesn't bother the former lawyer's growing base of fans she's now translated into 25 languages and despite Murphy's occasional "you go, girl" silliness, she's the best character Scottoline has created in a while. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The lawyers in Scottoline's all-woman law firm, Rosato and Associates, are generally attractive and interesting; they tend to act on emotion and feeling, in addition to judgment and logic. In the case of protagonist Anne Murphy, the author takes this a bit too far; Anne's actions are irrational and unreasonable in many instances, making the plot somewhat unbelievable. Still, the story is exciting and deals with some interesting issues, e.g., stalking, sexual harassment, family estrangement, and high-tech corruption. As usual, Scottoline's descriptions of the Philadelphia scene are great. Barbara Rosenblat does a good job with the characters, but the fireworks at the end of the story need a different approach. Recommended where legal thrillers are popular.Christine Valentine, Davenport Univ., Kalamazoo, MICopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Anne Murphy is a beautiful, young trial lawyer in Manolo Blahniks, getting settled in a new city. When a casual acquaintance who is cat-sitting gets murdered in Anne's stead, apparently by the stalker whom Anne fled east to avoid, the chase is on; Anne and her law partners have to find the killer before he learns she's alive. Barbara Rosenblat performs like a three-ring circus, juggling flaming torches while galloping bareback. When the whole cast of crooks, lawyers, cops, reporters, parents, friends, and lovers take their curtain call in the person of Rosenblat, you know you've been ringside for an amazing, and totally entertaining, performance. B.G. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
The all-female firm of Rosato & Associates, first introduced in Mistaken Identity (1999), recently hired associate Anne Murphy, a California girl new to Philadelphia. After her first successful courtroom appearance, Anne escapes the city for the Fourth of July weekend, planning to buckle down for an upcoming trial; then, the next morning, she reads in a newspaper that she's been murdered. Is this just a simple mix-up, or is Anne's nemesis, Kevin Satorno, a creep who stalked and then assaulted her in L.A., after her again? Having no relatives who would mourn her death, Anne decides to stay murdered for a while and find out the truth on her own. Incognito, she turns the tables on Kevin, planting his name all over the country as the murder suspect and stalking him. The best-selling Scottoline has a knack for writing catchy whodunits with wit, charm, and mischief, and she doesn't disappoint here. Stock up, the publisher plans a $500,000 marketing campaign. Mary Frances Wilkens
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description

Anne Murphy is the redheaded rookie at the Philadelphia law firm of Rosato & Associates, and one morning she wakes up to front-page headlines proclaiming lawyer murdered -- above her own picture.

To find the killer, Anne's got to play dead -- if she wants to stay alive. Though she tries to go it alone, she quickly realizes she'll have to trust people she barely knows -- colleagues who hate her, a homicide squad that wants her out of the crime-fighting business, and a new love who inconveniently happens to be opposing counsel.

But her knack for courting trouble makes it almost impossible for Anne to play well with others, and an unexpected event places her in lethal jeopardy and leaves her with everything to lose -- including her life.


Download Description
E-book extras: "A Little More About Lisa"; "One Night on My Book Tour": Essay; "The Novels" (Chapter One from each of Lisa's eight prior novels). How many people get to solve their own murder? In Courting Trouble, New York Times bestselling author Lisa Scottoline is back with another fast-paced thriller that sends a young woman lawyer racing to find out who's trying to kill her -- after she's wrongly been reported murdered. Anne Murphy is smart, gorgeous, and young -- the red-headed rookie at the Philadelphia law firm of Rosato & Associates. She leaves town for the Fourth of July weekend to prepare for a high-profile trial, but when she buys her morning newspaper, her own photo is plastered all over the front page. And the headline - LAWYER MURDERED - supposedly refers to her. Anne sets out to find her killer, playing dead in order to stay alive. The investigation takes all of Anne's boldness and ingenuity - plus a pair of red satin hot pants. But her knack for courting trouble makes it almost impossible for Anne to play well with others, defend the lawsuit, and fight her urge to sleep with the enemy. Then an unexpected event places her in lethal jeopardy and leaves her with everything to lose - including her life.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Lisa Scottoline has garnered legions of fans with highly entertaining legal thrillers that offer a trademark blend of suspense, romance, comic wit, and strong female characters.

Courting Trouble introduces Anne Murphy, a feisty, fashionable, beautiful young attorney who seems to have it all. (She can even run like a first-class sprinter in her Manolo Blahniks.) But when Anne's cat-sitter is brutally murdered while she's out of town -- and the mutilated corpse is mistaken for Anne -- her envious colleagues at the all-female law firm Rosato & Associates are forced to confront some harsh truths about the price of beauty, the power of jealousy, and their own cold judgments.

Anne has pressing concerns of her own. After reading about the murder in the papers, she secretly contacts her boss and two of the firm's top associates for help. Trying to lull the killer into a false sense of security, the crack team of legal eagles decides to keep Anne's alive-and-kicking status a secret. They quickly track down their main suspect, an escaped convict and stalker who threatened Anne once before, and report his whereabouts to the police. But if you think Courting Trouble ends there, you haven't read much Scottoline. As with her incredibly popular bestsellers The Vendetta Defense, Everywhere That Mary Went, and Final Appeal, the suspense doesn't let up until a whammy of a surprise ending in the final pages.

Sexy, sassy, suspenseful, and just plain fun, Courting Trouble is exactly the kind of thriller Scottoline fans crave. (Brian Perrin)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Anne Murphy is smart, gorgeous, and young, the redheaded rookie at the Philadelphia law firm of Rosato & Associates. She leaves town for the Fourth of July weekend to prepare for a high-profile trial, but when she buys her morning newspaper, her own photo is plastered all over the front page. And the headline - LAWYER MURDERED - supposedly refers to her. Anne sets out to find her killer, playing dead in order to stay alive." She tries to go it alone but quickly realizes that she'll have to trust people she barely knows - colleagues who hate her guts, a homicide squad that wants her out of the crime-fighting business, and a new love who inconveniently happens to be opposing counsel. The investigation takes all of Anne's boldness and ingenuity - plus a pair of red satin hot pants. But her knack for courting trouble makes it almost impossible for Anne to play well with others, defend the lawsuit, and fight her urge to sleep with the enemy. Then an unexpected event places her in lethal jeopardy and leaves her with everything to lose - including her life.

SYNOPSIS

E-book extras: "A Little More About Lisa"; "One Night on My Book Tour": Essay; "The Novels" (Chapter One from each of Lisa's eight prior novels).

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

New York Times bestseller Scottoline's cast of beautiful female lawyers at Philadelphia's Rosato & Associates is augmented by red-headed bombshell Anne Murphy, a woman with a secret past, who's trying to make a go of it in a new city. An intriguing character jammed into a laborious plot, Murphy toils as a career-minded loner. On a much-needed weekend away from her heavy caseload, she picks up a newspaper to read that she has been murdered by an intruder who blasted her in the face with a shotgun. Murphy knows the real victim was the woman who had agreed to feed her cat; she also knows that the murderer was likely Kevin Satorno, the stalker who nearly killed her a year earlier while she was living in Los Angeles. Murphy figures that if Satorno discovers he actually killed the wrong person, he'll continue hunting her, so she decides to play dead and enlist the help of her new colleagues at Rosato & Associates to track him down. Scottoline (The Vendetta Defense; Moment of Truth) wraps up the far-fetched action in high style, with a few predictable twists, at Philly's big outdoor Fourth of July celebration. As in her eight previous women-in-peril legal thrillers, she tempers the plot's bloodshed with a bouncy tone that some readers may find cloying. But this doesn't bother the former lawyer's growing base of fans she's now translated into 25 languages and despite Murphy's occasional "you go, girl" silliness, she's the best character Scottoline has created in a while. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The lawyers in Scottoline's all-woman law firm, Rosato and Associates, are generally attractive and interesting; they tend to act on emotion and feeling, in addition to judgment and logic. In the case of protagonist Anne Murphy, the author takes this a bit too far; Anne's actions are irrational and unreasonable in many instances, making the plot somewhat unbelievable. Still, the story is exciting and deals with some interesting issues, e.g., stalking, sexual harassment, family estrangement, and high-tech corruption. As usual, Scottoline's descriptions of the Philadelphia scene are great. Barbara Rosenblat does a good job with the characters, but the fireworks at the end of the story need a different approach. Recommended where legal thrillers are popular.-Christine Valentine, Davenport Univ., Kalamazoo, MI

AudioFile

Anne Murphy is a beautiful, young trial lawyer in Manolo Blahniks, getting settled in a new city. When a casual acquaintance who is cat-sitting gets murdered in Anne's stead, apparently by the stalker whom Anne fled east to avoid, the chase is on; Anne and her law partners have to find the killer before he learns she's alive. Barbara Rosenblat performs like a three-ring circus, juggling flaming torches while galloping bareback. When the whole cast of crooks, lawyers, cops, reporters, parents, friends, and lovers take their curtain call in the person of Rosenblat, you know you've been ringside for an amazing, and totally entertaining, performance. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

The newest member of Philadelphia's ladies-only law firm of Rosato & Associates (The Vendetta Defense) lands a once-in-a-lifetime case: investigating her own murder. Using Scottoline's trademark razzle-dazzle tactics, Anne Murphy-who honors "precision . . . in the law, brain surgery, and lipliner"-has just succeeded in getting the judge to exclude a crucial witness against Gil Martin, the dot-com millionaire client she's defending in a sexual-harassment case, when the legal machinery grinds to a halt for the 4th of July weekend. Flush with success, Anne has nobody to celebrate it with. She's new to the East Coast, long estranged from her alcoholic actress mother, and wary about seeing men ever since her first date with LA erotomaniac Kevin Satorno turned him into a stalker now doing hard time. Deciding on a whim to leave town for the weekend, she's happy to accept her artist acquaintance Willa Hansen's offer to house-sit her cat. Next morning, though, her holiday ends when she reads a headline announcing her own murder. Clearly, Willa's been shotgunned to death in her place-and it's no mystery by whom, since a phone call confirms that Kevin has indeed just escaped from prison. Figuring that reporting their little mistake to the authorities would put her back at the top of Kevin's hit list, Anne resolves to stay underground. But things don't exactly work out that way. She's forced to reveal herself first to Rosato & Associates; then to Matt Booker, the plaintiff's attorney who's been making puppy-dog eyes at her across the aisle; then to Philadelphia's finest; and finally, at the height of Independence Day festivities, to Kevin himself. A glamorpuss lawyer whose behavior defies belief; gay bars and hooker disguises; a little detection, a little courtroom drama, and one noisy finale: it's all as fleet and breathless as it is synthetic.

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