"Just a few years ago, Corie Geller was busting terrorists as an agent for the FBI. But at thirty-five, she traded in her badge for the stability of marriage and motherhood. Now Corie is married to the brilliant and remarkably handsome Judge Josh Geller and is the adoptive mother of his fourteen-year-old daughter. Corie fills her days scouting Arabic fiction for literary agencies and, every Wednesday, she joins a group of fellow Shorehaven freelancers for lunch at an allegedly French bistro. Life is, as they say, fine. But at her weekly lunch group, Corie senses that something is off. Pete Delaney, a milquetoast package designer, shows up early every week. He sits in the same spot, often with a different phone in hand, and always keeps one eye on his Jeep parked in the lot across the street. Corie can't help thinking that Pete is hiding something--and as someone who is accustomed to keeping her FBI past a secret from her new neighbors, she should know. But does Pete really have a shady alternate life, or is Corie imagining things, desperate to add some spark to her sweet but unduly safe existence? She decides that the only way to find out is to dust off her FBI toolkit and take a deep dive into Pete Delaney's affairs."--

Prizewinning journalist Janet Malcolm discovers the elements of Greek tragedy in a sensational New York City murder trial "Astringent and absorbing. . . . Iphigenia in Forest Hills casts, from its first pages, a genuine spell -- the kind of spell to which Ms. Malcolm's admirers (and I am one) have become addicted."--Dwight Garner, New York Times "This is shrewd and quirky crime reporting at its irresistible and disabused best."--Louis Begley, Wall Street Journal "She couldn't have done it and she must have done it." This is the enigma at the heart of Janet Malcolm's riveting book about a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, that captured national attention. The defendant, Mazoltuv Borukhova, a beautiful young physician, is accused of hiring an assassin to kill her estranged husband, Daniel Malakov, a respected orthodontist, in the presence of their four-year old child. The prosecutor calls it an act of vengeance: just weeks before Malakov was killed in cold blood, he was given custody of Michelle for inexplicable reasons. It is the "Dickensian ordeal" of Borukhova's innocent child that drives Malcolm's inquiry. With the intellectual and emotional precision for which she is known, Malcolm looks at the trial--"a contest between competing narratives"--from every conceivable angle. It is the chasm between our ideals of justice and the human factors that influence every trial--from divergent lawyering abilities to the nature of jury selection, the malleability of evidence, and the disposition of the judge--that is perhaps most striking. Surely one of the most keenly observed trial books ever written, Iphigenia in Forest Hills is ultimately about character and "reasonable doubt." As Jeffrey Rosen writes, it is "as suspenseful and exciting as a detective story, with all the moral and intellectual interest of a great novel." " Iphigenia in Forest Hills is another dazzling triumph from Janet Malcolm. Here, as always, Malcolm's work inspires the best kind of disquiet in a reader--the obligation to think." --Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court "A remarkable achievement that ranks with Malcolm's greatest books. Her scrupulous reporting and interviews with protagonists on both sides of the trial make her own narrative as suspenseful and exciting as a detective story, with all the moral and intellectual interest of a great novel." --Jeffrey Rosen, author of The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America