If you love to crack codes or solve mysteries then you might enjoy this book but There's something deeply unsettling about a book that makes you question whether justice is real — not justice as a concept, not justice in movies, but actual justice in actual courtrooms with actual human beings holding lives in their hands. Her Cold Justice by Robert Dugoni had me in that headspace from the very first page, and honestly, I didn't fully recover until long after I'd finished it.
It opens in July 1985, during a suffocating Seattle heatwave. A homicide detective named Jack Thompson responds to a robbery at Tran Jewelry Market in Little Saigon. Inside the shop, he finds the owners husband and wife bound and shot in the back room. The space is clearly also their home, with food left out and schoolwork unfinished. That detail alone schoolwork unfinished gutted me and then it gets worse. When Thompson looks under a bed, he discovers their young daughter hiding there in a school uniform, staring in terror toward her parents' bodies. This image is not an accident. It is a seed that Dugoni plants in page one and waters throughout the entire book. I didn't fully understand why until much, much later.
Fast forward to present day Seattle. Homicide detective Frank Rossi arrives at a fresh crime scene in South Seattle. Two people are dead — John Lockett, shot in a detached garage while working on a vintage car, and his girlfriend Melissa Scott, beaten to death in the bedroom. The house holds a messy clue trail: opened Blue Horizon Air Cargo packages with drugs, powder, pills, and cash spilling out. The brutality feels personal, and that detail about the bedroom — I kept coming back to it to me someone was furious.
Then we meet Keera Duggan — defense attorney, chess champion, razor-sharp and deeply human. Her private investigator JP Harrison, a former homicide detective, asks her for a personal favour. His nephew, Michael Westbrook, has been arrested and is sitting in federal detention, accused of participating in a fentanyl-smuggling operation connected to Blue Horizon Air Cargo, where Michael works. And here's where it gets personal. JP isn't just an employee — he's her trusted right hand. His desperation is palpable, and Keera can't say no to that.
Michael is scared and confused, he says his car wouldn't start the night of the murders, so he took an Uber to work. After their shift ended around 4:30 a.m., Lockett gave him a ride home. Michael claims Lockett asked him to hold some packages, describing them as hidden birthday gifts for Melissa. He says he didn't open them and didn't know what they contained. When police showed up and found fentanyl and nearly $16,000 in cash in his bedroom, he panicked, tried to run, and was subdued — which only hardened police suspicion.
And I sat there thinking, of course he ran. A young Black man, drugs in his room that weren't his, police at the door. The story doesn't let me forget what Michael is up against. His fear makes complete sense, and yet it becomes the thing that convicts him in the court of public opinion before a single juror is seated.
But the real villain of this book isn't even in that house. Ruthless star prosecutor Anh Tran has gotten convictions on much less. And the moment she enters the story, the temperature drops. She is calculated, brilliant, and plays dirty. Tran doesn't disclose all the evidence, which is required under rules of discovery. Then there are two prison informants who volunteer that Michael had confessed to them that he committed the murders. I was like omg 😱 Prison informants. The oldest, most unreliable trick in prosecutorial history — and yet somehow it keeps working in real courtrooms everywhere. That part enraged me in the most productive way.
The case starts looking simple on the surface — drugs, cash, and a convenient suspect — but quickly turns into something far more unsettling. It all started as a murder defence suddenly it spirals into a conspiracy with far-reaching consequences. Keera starts pulling at threads and finding that nothing lines up the way the prosecution wants it to. The 1985 flashback? That little girl hiding under the bed? It comes back. And when it does, it reframes everything you thought you understood about this story's anatomy.
Dugoni does an impressive job blending captivating courtroom scenes with Keera's personal life. Her family members appear throughout, which makes Keera's character feel more real and relatable. She's not a superhero. She doubts herself. She carries the weight of JP's trust like a stone in her chest the entire time, and watching her navigate both the courtroom pressure and the human cost of possibly failing Michael was genuinely difficult to watch unfold.
Hope I've not spoilt it for you but the story continues and also yhe story offers something distinct with a corruption and conspiracy element that runs deeper than a single murder case. This is bigger than Michael and that's the moment the book stops being a legal thriller and becomes something closer to a moral reckoning because come to think of it Keera isn't just fighting for her client — she's fighting against a system that has quietly decided who matters and who doesn't, long before the trial ever begins.
I urge you to Read this book and lthen sit with it for a while. It deserves that.
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