But Remember Their Names

Eight colonists were killed at the original Battle of Lexington, but just before Thanksgiving, at the Pittsburgh Museum of American History, the life-sized diorama of that battle has nine bodies. The ninth is a murder victim, Thomas Bradshaw, a prominent Pittsburgh connoisseur, and Cynthia Jakubec will be drawn into one of the sideshows surrounding the investigation. Jakubec is a working-class gal who’s about to jump from Main Street to Wall Street on the strength of her Harvard Law School degree—and marry a budding novelist as well—when the big recession in the fall of 2008 puts her dream on hold. She finds herself working, temporarily she hopes, as a legal intern at a Pittsburgh law firm that does “street law” instead of “suite law.” The firm is representing Thomas Bradshaw’s daughter, who may be a material witness to the crime—or worse. As Jakubec follows the investigation, the trail takes her from a black church in Pittsburgh’s ghetto to the very luxury building in midtown Manhattan, where she dreams of working, and gives her a broken nose and a broken heart along the way. Before her Wall Street dream is again within her grasp, Jakubec will come to appreciate Robert F. Kennedy’s memorable advice: “Forgive your enemies—but remember their names.”