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The Missing Piece is, I don’t know, the 24th Dismas Hardy novel by John Lescroart. Maybe it’s the 25th, or 22nd. The book is another session with a set of characters we’ve gotten to know over the years: Hardy, the dogged defense attorney, his partner Wes Farrell, who is a former San Francisco DA, and Abe Glitzky, the half-Jewish, half-black former head of SFPD Homicide. Glitzky now works as a private investigator, and this book is mostly about him.

At the start of the book, we witness the murder of Paul Riley, a man recently released from prison through the efforts of the Exoneration Initiative, a pro-bono bleeding heart organization that either frees unjustly imprisoned citizens or puts killers back on the street—depending on whom you ask. In Riley’s case, he went down for 11 years for the rape and murder of a teenaged girl, whose father, Doug Rush, instantly becomes the top suspect in Riley’s death.

For Rush, the killing is justified, even overdue, but he claims he didn’t do it. He has a real attitude problem, though, which leads to him getting him gratuitously roughed up by a jaded homicide detective. He’s arrested for murder, with Paul Riley’s father identifying him as the shooter. Rush asks Dismas Hardy to represent him. It’s one of those maddening cases where the evidence against the client is thin, but a conviction seems likely.

Hardy assigns Glitzky to look into the matter, and the old detective quickly starts to see that something is not right. Rush has no alibi, except that he was riding his motorcycle near the Bay when the shooting occurred. No one saw him, or so he says. Doug is a biker, and Glitzky starts to suspect that perhaps one of his biker buddies killed Riley to avenge Doug’s daughter—without telling Doug.

Then, all of a sudden, Doug has disappeared. He turns up dead in the park, and no one has any idea how he got there or who did it. Glitzky is more convinced than ever that Doug is innocent of killing Riley, but he has little to go on. Finally, he comes across the smallest of clues and gets in touch with Doug’s actual alibi for the Riley killing.

I don’t want to spoil the story here, but let’s just say it gets pretty messy. The whole case starts to look different, and Glitzky is on the trail of the real killer. The process takes him deeper into the Exoneration Project and its dubious outcomes.

Lescroart knows his way around the legal system. The book is full of engaging courtroom and investigative twists and turns. He gets you think about the ethics of exoneration, which is not as black and white a matter as you might think.

If you like a good legal thriller, this book is probably for you.

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