Late one October night Justice Abe Rosenberg, at ninety-one the Supreme Court's Liberal legend, is shot to death in his Georgetown home. Two hours later Glenn Jensen, the Court's youngest and most conservative justice, is strangled. The country is stunned the FBI has no clues. But Darby Shaw, a brilliant law student at Tulane, thinks she has the answer. Days of digging through the law library's computers have led her to draft a brief speculating on an obscure connection between the two justicesand a most unlikely suspect. Her suspect has powerful friends: one evening, outside a New Orleans restaurant, Darby narrowly escapes an assassin's car bomb. Someone has read her briefsomeone who wants her dead. Alone and frightened, Darby disappears into the anonymous shadows of the French Quarter, where she contacts the investigative reporter Gary Grantham and convinces him that Washington's position on the killings amounts to the biggest cover-up since Watergate. Together they go underground on the run, trying to stay alive long enough to expose the real truth contained in the Pelican Brief.