Face Value

As St. Louis attorney Rachel Gold knows firsthand, the grueling hours and demands of Big Law take their toll on young lawyers. Some turn to drugs, some quit the profession, and occasionally one quits altogether. According to the medical examiner, Sari Bashir quit for good on leaving work one Thursday night. That's when she fell to her death from the eighth floor of the downtown garage adjacent to her firm where she parked her car. The police ruled her death a suicide. Stanley Plotkin, however, rules it a homicide. Stanley is a genius. He also has Asperger’s Syndrome which makes employing him tricky. So Sari’s firm employed Stanley in the mail room. Among his obsessions is the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), a massive compilation that correlates hundreds of facial muscle actions with specific emotions and mental states. For someone like Stanley, who can’t read people’s emotions from their facial expressions, FACS is like a hearing aid for the hearing impaired. And his mastery of FACS is so complete he’s sure that Sari did not kill herself. Rachel had been close with Sari, who worked for her during law school. She also knows Stanley because their mothers are friends. When he calls Sari’s death murder as Rachel drives him home from Sari's memorial service, she listens. And when Sari's grieving father pleads with Rachel to review the police file on his daughter's suicide, she reluctantly, though with consummate skill and deploying unlikely colleagues, starts an investigation that will lead into the heart of a dark criminal enterprise rife with collateral damage. Like Sari….