PLEA OF INSANITY REVIEW

                                                                     by Queenie D"...without an obvious motive, what kind of person could murder his entire family in cold blood and then be devious enough to successfully fake the symptoms of schizophrenia to get away with it?" When Julia Vacanti is called to the office of the division chief of Major Crimes, she's sure she's being handed her walking papers. After all, she did just royally piss off a judge by requesting a trial against a wife-beater with no witnesses. When she arrives at Charley Rifkin's office, she is further dismayed to find her current lover waiting for her as well. But things are not as they seem.
Be it a case of sleeping up the corporate ladder, or the fact that Julia is an excellent trial lawyer with a penchant for winning over jury's, she's been asked to sit as second chair in an "off-the-charts high profile" murder. Dr. David Marquette has brutally murdered his wife and three children in their sleep, and is now claiming insanity.
Julia's initial reluctance to take the case is not just that it could be career suicide, but she's got a complex, horrific past of her own that strikes to close to the heart of this case. Emotions, threats, passions, and insanities run high during the course of this trial and the only thing left to find out is what will become of the beautiful, yet haunted, Ms. Vacanti?

Jilliane Hoffman InterviewAUTHOR(S): Jilliane Hoffman TYPE OF BOOK: Fiction
NUMBER OF PAGES: 424
YEAR PUBLISHED: 2008
RECOGNITION:
Bestselling Author

Plea of Insanity Opinion
FANTASTIC! Jilliane Hoffman is truly the Queen of Suspense, a title I do not hand out lightly! I was turning the pages of this novel so fast I actually skipped a few from time to time and had to slow myself down. I couldn't handle the anticipation of what might happen next. At nearly 500 pages, you would think a few days to finish would be appropriate. Not quite! I read from 7pm-1am with NO stops. Nobody and nothing was tearing me away from this book.
So why did it have such an impact on me as a reader? I really thought about this because murder mysteries are a dime a dozen, but for some reason this one had more of a profound effect on me. I realized that not only is it a compelling, shocking, gruesome murder, the plot is rooted in the questions of guilt vs. innocence, and sane vs. insane. What does it really mean to be on either side of these two coins? Is it possible for a good person to do bad things because they can't control themselves? Is it possible for a sane person to completely fake insanity, fooling even the most prominent of doctors? Further, how much weight is given to the research that insanity, schizophrenia in particular, is hereditary? These are just a few of the questions that arose as I sprinted through this book.
Of course, there is a love story which will also hold readers in its grasp because of its unexpected tenderness. All-in-all, this is an absolute "must read!"