Mistress of Justice

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Two of my most heartfelt beliefs about writing suspense fiction are these: First, it's a craft – a skill that can be learned and refined and improved with practice. Second, we writers of suspense fiction have a duty to entertain and to – as the other moniker for the genre suggests – thrill our readers.

In rereading the first version of this book, which I wrote thirteen years ago, I realized that, while it was a perfectly acceptable dramatic, character-driven study of life on Wall Street, it didn't make my – and presumably my readers' – palms sweat.

It didn't, in other words, thrill.

I considered just letting the book stand as a curiosity among the suspense novels I've written but I felt the nag of the second belief I mentioned above – that overarching duty to readers I know how much I enjoy the experience of reading a roller coaster of a story and I felt that the premise of this novel and the characters I'd created would lend themselves to more of a carnival ride of a book. Hence, I dismantled the book completely and rewrote nearly all of it.

I had a chance recently to write an introduction to a new edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and during the course of researching her work I learned that she significantly revised the novel thirteen years after it was first published (how's that for a coincidence?) Many of the changes in the later edition of Frankenstein reflected the author's altered worldview. Not so in the case of Mistress of Justice. The current edition stands true to its view of Wall Street in the chaotic era of the 1980s – takeover fever, uncontrolled wealth, too-chic-for-words Manhattan clubs, ruthlessness in boardrooms and bedrooms and the many hardworking lawyers who wished for nothing more than to help their clients and to make a living at their chosen profession.

My special thanks to editor Kate Miciak for giving me this chance and for helping this book realize its potential.

– J. D., Pacific Grove, CA, 2001