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Written by Richard North Patterson - Audio book performed by Patricia Kalember - Abridged Fiction - 3 CASSETTES - 5 hours

A newly elected president faces the unexpected chance to nominate a new chief justice of the Supreme Court. His first choice is a nationally respected Court of Appeals judge, a woman whose nomination faces two serious obstacles: a long-held personal secret; and the prospect that a volatile abortion case--a trial pitting a 15-year old girl against her pro-life parents--will come before the court. And, the Senate majority leader is determined to thwart the president's nomination for reasons that cross the boundary between the political and the personal.

As these stories intertwine, building in complexity and suspense, Patterson gives us the resounding clash of competing ambitions between the president and the majority leader; the equally momentous collision of science and culture in the courtroom; and, in an unprecedented novelistic depection of the legal process from the perspective of the judge rather than the lawyers, a revelation of both how the judicial system works and how it intersects with politics, for better and for worse.

About the Author: Richard North Patterson is the author of 10 previous novels, including Dark Lady, No Safe Place, The Final Judgement, and Eyes of a Child. He has won an Edgar Allan Poe Award and France's Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere. He lives with his wife and children in San Francisco and on Martha's Vineyard.