Chasing Shadows

He confessed to a murder from a payphone in a state mental hospital. Nothing he said matched the body.

The debut novel from author Maggie Dalton, a retired criminal defense investigator. 

January 1991. Public Defender investigator Liz Hudson hauls two water-stained banker boxes out of a departing attorney’s office and starts sorting. The case is eight years old and has never seen a courtroom: a client found incompetent to stand trial, warehoused at a state hospital since 1983, charged with the 1981 killing of a woman found in a burned-out Cadillac Coupe de Ville on a beach-town street.

The file has no page numbers, half the reports are missing, and the only evidence is a phone call. The autopsy says a blow to the head. The caller said strangled, raped, robbed. Liz has read enough homicide files to know what she is looking at, and what she is looking at is an innocent man.

Ten years earlier, Jean Washington drove her fifteen-year-old Cadillac back to California with a mink stole in the trunk and a plan to reclaim the Hollywood career she left behind. Bill Woodley rode a Greyhound west with a letter from his brother in his shirt pocket and voices in his head telling him he wasn’t wanted. Neither of them found what they came for.

Now Liz and attorney Ben Robinson have to restore a schizophrenic client to competency, pry loose discovery a prosecutor would rather sit on, and find a decade-old alibi for a man who never had a bank account, a driver’s license, or a friend. And somewhere in four hundred pages of arson reports nobody ever read, there is a name.

Chasing Shadows is a crime novel drawn from a real wrongful-conviction case, told from inside the public defender’s office and inside the mind of the man the system forgot. For readers who want their mysteries built from procedure and people rather than twists.