Kate Millholland is a Chicago business lawyer with Society lineage who pushes the envelope at the staid law firm at which she is a partner. As a favor to her old friend Chrissy, Kate has traveled to Milwaukee to assist in a tense situation involving the Milwaukee Monarchs football team. The team's owner, Beau Rendell, has mismanaged the team professionally and financially. The Monarchs are losing the majority of their games, and worse, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Only a prospective move to football-hungry Los Angeles can save the team. Jeff Rendell, the team's general manager and Chrissy's husband, supports the move. But Beau has other ideas. "I'll die before I move this team," he declares.

Soon afterwards, his words become prophetic, as Beau falls down a flight of stairs and dies. His shocked son, Jeff, becomes the prime murder suspect when an autopsy reveals that Beau was choked to death before he fell. Although Kate is not a defense attorney, she tries to deflect attention from Jeff and Chrissy to other potential suspects. At the same time she also desperately searches for a way to prevent the Monarchs' financial ruin. And of course she has to keep up with her law firm duties, which are currently focused on helping a sleazy entertainment firm (with a chain of adult restaurants entitled "Tit-Elations") file with the SEC and go public.

The novel starts out slowly but grows stronger after the first 50 pages. Kate is a prickly but sympathetic heroine with interesting friends and a messy love life. Her first-person narrative and wry sense of humor add some welcome spark to a frequently dark novel, as when she describes her relationship with her mother, Astrid E. Millholland ("The 'E' is for Establishment"):

"Over the years our relationship had acquired a certain efficiency. We no longer worked our way up to an argument, but instead had them always at the ready and just jumped right in."

Then suddenly I stumbled onto the problem. Without giving away the plot, I will say that a critical piece of information that Kate herself discloses to the reader in the first 75 pages is suddenly "revealed" during the denouement as if Kate were just discovering it. Our first-person narrator has a convenient case of amnesia. Unfortunately, the reader has been aware of this information all along, so the surprise identity of the murderer is spoiled. After that, there's not much left except to figure out who will live and die until the next installment of the series.

It's a shame that either the author or the editor made such a serious blunder, because Rough Trade could have been a 4-star book. I'd approach the next Kate Millholland mystery warily and would advise you to skip this one.

--Susan Scribner