Write.
Release.
Repeat.

The only witness to the murder is an eight-inch paper disc turning behind glass in a locked instrument cabinet — and it says the shot was fired ten minutes after Lorraine Wendt got there.

Cleveland, October 1978. Lorraine Wendt owns exactly one thing: a block of stock in her husband's company that an accountant parked in her name in 1971 and everyone since has forgotten. It is enough to bring Vance Sterling into court for an emergency order freezing the company's accounts while its president sells the assets out from under it. The hearing is set for Friday at nine.

On Thursday night a woman telephones and tells her where to find her husband. She drives out into valley fog and finds gas venting behind the meter house, nobody answering, Hollis Lattimer dead on the field office floor, and her own pistol lying on the desk. She picks it up. By noon Friday there is a warrant.

County Prosecutor Evelyn Pryor reads a file with no soft spot in it. The pistol is the defendant's. The motive is the only asset she owns. She lied to the police about why she drove out there. And East Ohio Gas's chart recorder — a company instrument, in a company cabinet, serviced every morning of its life — scribed the line going to zero at a quarter past nine that night.

Evelyn Pryor is never wrong about the facts. To save his client, Sterling will have to prove she is wrong about one machine.

The Case of the Second Pass is the third case on Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — courtroom mysteries in the classic style, set in the analog Cleveland of the late 1970s: fair-play puzzles, shoe-leather investigation, and verdicts turned on evidence the reader has seen all along.

On the coldest morning of the year, a man who walks in his sleep is found in the snow with no memory of the night — and the sheath of the ice pick that killed his brother frozen into his hand.

Cleveland, January 1979. A blizzard is shutting the turnpikes on the near-anniversary of the storm that closed the city a year before — the same night Gordon Albright rose in his sleep, stood over his wife with an ice pick, and sent her running to a cottage on Lake Erie and a lawyer's office to file for divorce. That decree is hours from final when Albright gathers the last people who can stop it under one roof: a partner demanding a ruinous buyout of the plant, an estranged wife who has thrown in with him, and the quiet stepbrother who keeps the company's books.

By dawn the boiler is dead, the drifts are to the sills, and Ted Mercer lies stabbed through the heart in a bed that was not his, the brass ice pick from the library bar left in the wound. Gordon Albright is found wandering the frozen grounds, hypothermic and unable to account for a single hour of the night. Homicide Captain Marcus Thorne makes the arrest. County Prosecutor Evelyn Pryor reads the file — a documented history of sleepwalking violence, a marriage worth killing to keep, eight blank hours — and prosecutes it straight, because the file is airtight.

Gordon's secretary calls Vance Sterling. The State's case rests on a witness who swears to what he saw and heard the night of the murder, an alibi propped on a long-exposure photograph and a single telephone call. Sterling believes every word of it — except one, and that one is impossible. To keep a man who cannot testify for himself out of prison for the rest of his life, he will have to prove it with what the analog world left lying in plain sight: a freighter's position logs, two coin-phone toll tickets, and a photograph that holds one detail too many.

The Case of the Icebound Witness is the second case on Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — courtroom mysteries in the classic style, set in the analog Cleveland of the late 1970s: fair-play puzzles, shoe-leather investigation, and verdicts turned on evidence the reader has seen all along.

Somebody put a loaded .38 in Vivian Novak's apron. Then somebody put a dead man in her path.

Cleveland, November 1978. Vivian Novak has been in the papers once already — cleared of a theft she didn't commit, convicted anyway by everyone who read the headline. So when a revolver turns up in her locked locker at the diner, she doesn't call the police. She calls a lawyer.

Vance Sterling's instructions are simple: the gun stays in his office safe overnight, she sleeps at a quiet motel in Lakewood, and in the morning he delivers the whole problem to the Homicide captain personally. By midnight the plan is in pieces. A detour through the dark of Whiskey Island, a black sedan running with its lights off, two blind warning shots fired out a car window — and a Lincoln in the shallows of the Cuyahoga with a dead union man behind the wheel, shot through the temple.

The dead man blackmailed her father. Her revolver shows two spent chambers. The fatal bullet is consistent with her gun. County Prosecutor Evelyn Pryor reads the file and prosecutes it straight, because the file is airtight.

Sterling knows the revolver was unfired hours before the killing — it sat on his own desk. But the one fact that can save Vivian Novak is a fact only her lawyer can swear to, and a lawyer who becomes a witness is a lawyer off the case. To keep her out of prison he will have to prove it another way: with a marine surveyor's tape measure, a county clerk's microfiche, and the two bullets the killer never went looking for.

The Case of the Whiskey Island Alibi is the first case on Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — courtroom mysteries in the classic style, set in the analog Cleveland of the late 1970s: fair-play puzzles, shoe-leather investigation, and verdicts turned on evidence the reader has seen all along.