Retribution

Jilliane Hoffman's first novel Retribution takes the stock material of the forensic thriller and the woman-in-jeopardy modern Gothic and combines them with an intelligent meditation on justice. When Banting is caught with an eviscerated blonde in the boot of his car, prosecutor Chloe thinks she has got bang to rights a serial killer she and her police allies have been tracking for months. When she realises that he is the man who raped her and left her for dead twelve years earlier, it only makes her more certain--and more determined to send him to his death and not stand down from a trial in which she cannot possibly be objective. Yet nothing is quite as it seems.