Query: H.L. Durkin/GUILTY CONSCIENCE 
                                                                                             (Mystery, Adult Fiction – 65,326 words) 
Mystery writer Jackie Snow ended her five-year hiatus as a screen writer with the publication of her new novel Cold Justice. The good news for Jackie is that it put her on the bestseller lists. She didn’t mind hearing that the Attorney General of the State of New York, Gabriella Rincini, was “inspired” by Cold Justice to reopen an investigation into of the murder of legal assistant Logan Spanos in the Attorney General’s office during the preceding administration. But then defense lawyer Ira Rothman representing former Attorney General Adrian Feltzer filed a lawsuit against Jackie and her publisher claiming the book wasn’t fiction but a docudrama formulated to put his client into prison despite the evidence in the case. Jackie was told that it was a frivolous lawsuit and would be thrown out by the judge, but a group of publishers ponied up a million dollars in exchange for Rothman dropping the lawsuit. Mystery writer Jackie Snow complained to the Chief of the LAPD that she was treated like a common criminal when interviewed by Detective Robert Hernandez in the murder of her neighbor. Fortunately, she had fellow writer Arnold Fassbinder as her alibi for the night of that murder. 

Now Jackie Snow was dead and an uneaten delivery pizza in her Hollywood Hills condominium the only clue to her killer. First Arnold Fassbinder was  a suspect in her murder. Then he was warned by detectives he might be next on the killer’s list. Finally, he was asked to help solve her murder. Was Jackie Snow killed as the result of reckless assertions and false statements about the fictional quality of Cold Justice? Or worse, that someone with a guilty conscience was worried that her next novel, Murder in the Rotunda, would out them as a murderer within the U.S. Senate?