The 9th Judgment

Plot summary

SFPD sergeant Lindsay Boxer and her squad are tracking down a man who approaches young mothers in shopping center parking garages and kills them and their infant children. This happens several times and causes widespread panic. The man then makes contact and demands a $2 million ransom in exchange for stopping the killing. He strikes at such random places and times that, despite Boxer's protests, the police decide to pay the ransom.

Boxer is selected to deliver the ransom and has the man guide her via cellphone. After forcing Boxer to strip to her panties to prove she is not wearing a wire, the man has her drive throughout San Francisco. The trek culminates on the Golden Gate Bridge where Boxer drops the suitcase with the ransom in it to a boat waiting below. The Coast Guard is able to apprehend the man in the boat, who turns out to be uninvolved in the killings—he had been told his picking up the suitcase was for a movie.

Upset at having not gotten his ransom, the man kills another mother and child. While at that crime scene, however, he was noticed by the owner of a store on Fisherman's Wharf. The owner recognized him as having bought a prepaid cellphone from his store earlier and gives Boxer and her team the surveillance tape from his store. From the tape, Boxer and her team identify the man and begin tracking him down.

Before they can find him, however, the man strikes again. However, the woman he chose was armed with a 22 caliber pistol—carried in response to the general panic caused by the shootings. She shoots the man and he dies just as Boxer and her team arrive.

In the plot's secondary case, a notorious female cat burglar dubbed 'Hello Kitty' breaks into the home of an aging movie star and his wife whilst they are eating dinner, the latter of whom happened to be law school classmates with Boxer's friend Yuki Castellano. The star and his wife come upstairs unexpectedly and the burglar is forced to wait in the closet until they fall asleep before she can escape. She waits, but in the process of escaping, knocks over a table. The movie star pulls out a gun and searches for the intruder before coming up with the idea of shooting and killing his wife in the hope that he can blame it on the burglar, who escapes unnoticed before the killing occurs. Through their investigation, Boxer and her team discover that the star had a girlfriend and wanted out of his marriage and that murder was cheaper than divorce. When confronted with the evidence, the star falsely claims that he shot his wife in self-defense after she attempted to shoot him.

It is also revealed that the cat burglar is actually a school teacher in an unhappy marriage. She is also in love with a female colleague and is only burglarizing in order to get enough money so that she and the colleague can escape to another country and start a new life together.

At the end, it is revealed that the female colleague the burglar has fallen in love with is also unhappily married—to the man who was killing mothers and children whom Boxer was tracking.

Reception

PattyaDailyNews.com reviewed the book, saying "Although this book may not be Pulitzer material, if you are looking for a read that is full of suspense and a fast moving plot, then this is the book for you."