Sid Kaplan once had it all: a dynamic career in criminal law, success, celebrity, lots of money, and enough arrogance to alienate practically everybody he knew. So no one wept for Sid when booze and cocaine plummeted him to hell. Only now a big case has fallen into Sid's lap, a case that, Sid thinks, can take him back to where he was and wants -- no, deserves -- to be.
Thelma Barrow, a Queens housewife, has sought out Sid to defend her accused daughter, Priscilla, in a media-hot murder case. For Sid, the publicity more than compensates for the pittance Thelma can afford to pay, as the news headlines stories of drugs and violence and an abused white woman who has done in her black husband. Nor is Sid disinclined by the fact that the white woman is a babe -- an ice-cold babe who's probably lying about more than a little, but a babe nevertheless.
It's when drug dealers show up and insist that Priscilla is holding out on them with $450,000 of their money that matters begin to get more criminally perilous. Then Sid's two roommates -- the only friends he's managed not to lose -- are killed in an attempt to make Sid himself cough up the
