National Network for Equitable Library Service

Before her Wall Street dream is again within her grasp, Cynthia Jakubek will come to appreciate Robert F. Kennedy's memorable advice: ''Forgive your enemies, but remember their names.'' Eight colonists were killed at the original Battle of Lexington, but just before Thanksgiving, at the Pittsburgh Museum of American History, the life-sized diorama of that battle has nine bodies. The ninth is a murder victim, Thomas Bradshaw, a prominent Pittsburgh connoisseur, and Cynthia Jakubek will be drawn into one of the sideshows surrounding the investigation. Jakubek is a working-class gal who's about to jump from Main Street to Wall Street on the strength of her Harvard Law School degree, and marry a budding novelist as well, when the big recession in the fall of 2008 puts her dream on hold. She finds herself working, temporarily she hopes, as a legal intern at a Pittsburgh law firm that does ''street law'' instead of ''suite law.'' The firm is representing Thomas Bradshaw's daughter, who may be a material witness to the crime, or worse. As Jakubek follows the investigation, the trail takes her from a black church in Pittsburgh's ghetto to the very luxury building in midtown Manhattan, where she dreams of working, and gives her a broken nose and a broken heart along the way.