"powerful legal thriller"

In Baltimore, a close friend offers attorney Val Covington an opportunity to open her own practice that would include office space in a former church owned by Rob Smith. Val leaps at the chance and offers a job to her sometime paralegal assistant at her old firm. Kendra Brooks accepts on the condition that Val represents pro bono her former lover and father of her child, a death row inmate that the assistant insists is innocent.

Seventeen years ago Daniel Monroe was convicted of killing a cop. His appeals are running out and soon the state will execute him unless a miracle occurs. Though believing that Kendra is seeing her beloved through the rose colored glasses of love, Val agrees to work the case. Surprisingly, Rob has investigative experience and skills and assists Val as they seek a smoking gun to prove her client's innocence while falling in love with one another.

TWIST OF FATE is a powerful legal thriller that assaults the current capital punishment system that focuses on convictions not guilt or innocence in a due process in which the prosecutor is always right. The story line contains a romantic subplot, but is clearly a call for action, not against the death penalty, but to insure that the wrong person is never executed. Though Rob's skills are too convenient as the cost of an investigator is extremely high (a key prosecutor advantage), the cast is multi-dimensional especially the courageous lead couple and Kendra. Mary Jo Putney condemns a blind system that often fails to catch the guilty by expeditiously going after a convenient victim.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted July 25, 2003

From the bestselling author Mary Jo Putney comes an emotionally charged story of a man and a woman brought together by a passion for justice, a hunger to change, and a ... Twist of Fate

Summary

Corporate law has given Val Covington high profile success—and no time for a life. Recklessly, she walks away from her uptown job and starts her own practice, determined to do work that matters. Renting a remodeled church gives her an added bonus in the form of her landlord. Rob Smith is the kind of guy Val is always attracted to: mysterious, handsome and haunted. Which means, based on her track record, that he is also a loser; but this time, she's smart enough to avoid involvement with the wrong man.

Then Val's assistant makes a desperate plea for help in saving her one-time lover from being executed for a crime he didn't' commit. Val agrees to try, but success seems impossible. Then Rob, who has private reasons for wanting to work with Val, offers his formidable investigative skills in the quest of justice. Working against the clock, Rob and Val discover irresistible passion as well a s long hidden secrets. But can two very different people change enough to build a life together?

Perhaps they can, when fate takes a hand...