DEAD CERTAIN is dead-on terrific. It features an attorney, but is not a courtroom thriller by any means. Rather, this is a story about detecting and righting wrongs and fulfilling dreams, full of twists and turns and sharp characterizations.

The majority of the book is narrated from the first-person present viewpoint of Ella Broden. Ella is a second generation attorney who somewhat reluctantly went to law school in order to please her father, a well-known Manhattan criminal defense attorney who lives and breathes the practice of law. Ella is now in practice with her father, who is fond of delivering witticisms regarding the judicial system and the practice of law at the drop of a gavel. Ella’s younger sister and best friend, Charlotte, is much more of a free spirit, enjoying life on the installment plan as she pursues a Master of Fine Arts degree.

"Adam Mitzner, a practicing attorney himself, imbues DEAD CERTAIN with an authoritative air of what the practice of criminal law involves, but in the office as opposed to the courtroom.... It’s an entertaining and riveting work that will more than hold your interest."

Both women, though, have secret lives. Ella pursues a singing career at night under an alter ego, while Charlotte has been writing a novel and has a publishing offer on the strength of the completed first half. It is a murder mystery that introduces the players in the first half and reveals the killer in the unwritten second half. Charlotte gives the completed portion of the manuscript to Ella, who, along with the reader, gets to read excerpts of this book within a book, which details the sexual and romantic exploits of a thinly disguised Charlotte, who is involved with three very different and potentially dangerous men.

Ella enjoys the story and is quite impressed with her sister’s literary talents, but the book takes on a new meaning when Charlotte goes missing without explanation. Ella is all but certain that her beloved sister has been murdered and that the doer is one of three people whose identity Charlotte has both hidden and revealed in her novel.

At the same time, Charlotte and her father have been retained by Paul Michelson, one of Charlotte’s old flames who is now the head of the derivatives desk at one of Wall Street’s most successful financial houses and is a person of interest in the disappearance of one of his employees. Paul seems very similar to one of the characters in Charlotte’s book, and Ella is wondering if perhaps he might be the person responsible for the disappearance. Employing an investigative skill set honed in part by her work as an attorney, Charlotte uses her sister’s manuscript as a guide in order to determine not only Charlotte’s ultimate fate but also who might be behind it, even as she puts herself in the same danger.

Adam Mitzner, a practicing attorney himself, imbues DEAD CERTAIN with an authoritative air of what the practice of criminal law involves, but in the office as opposed to the courtroom. The ethical dilemmas that Ella occasionally encounters --- representing a suspect in one case while investigating him in another --- are interesting and have a ring of truth to them, which resounds throughout the book. The best sections, however, concern the painstaking manner in which the grief-stricken but determined Ella uses the resources at her disposal --- primarily the unfinished manuscript --- to put herself in a position to ultimately obtain justice. It’s an entertaining and riveting work that will more than hold your interest.