by Lia Matera
First published 1997
Willa Jansson faces her strangest case yet when she agrees to represent a client charged with vehicular hit and run. The man insists he cannot be guilty because aliens abducted him before the accident occurred. Jansson must navigate a legal system that has no framework for extraterrestrial alibis while her client maintains his bizarre story with unwavering conviction. The case forces her to question the boundaries between legal evidence and impossible testimony. As she builds a defense strategy, Jansson confronts the challenge of representing someone whose truthfulness she cannot verify and whose story the court will never accept. The attorney finds herself caught between her professional duty to provide vigorous representation and the practical impossibility of proving an alien encounter. Her client's fate depends on whether she can find another explanation for his whereabouts or convince a jury to consider the unthinkable.
Genres: science-fiction, mystery, contemporary, legal-thriller
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, unreliable-narrator
255 pages · Hardcover · Simon & Schuster