Joseph T. Klempner – författare

It starts with some innocent family fun. Writer Stephen Barrow''s divorced wife, involved in a second marriage, has given Barrow custody of their six-year-old daughter, Penny. Father and daughter share a relationship that is tender, poignant, and funny. Their home life in a small upstate New York town is a happy and entirely wholesome one.

One evening Penny, in her bath, playfully straightens her shampoo-stiffened hair into the horn of a "unicord," and her father takes her picture. When she "moons" him and says, "Take this one!" he clicks the shutter, although the roll of film was finished. Or so the mechanically challenged Barrow believed.

The next day, the local pharmacy clerk using the photo machine is shocked by the snapshot, decides Stephen is a child pornographer, and calls the police, who arrest him. That is only the first step in Stephen Barrow''s descent into hell. A small-town police chief, a vengeful ex-wife, a fledgling psychologist, a district attorney facing re-election - all of these and more push Barrow deeper and deeper into the depths, until everything he has is taken from him, his freedom, his belongings, and most particularly his beloved daughter.

Best Intentions is a horror story. Not a horror story of monsters from the deep or roving homicidal psychopaths, but something much worse, something that batters at the readers'' defenses. As anyone familiar with Klempner''s previous books will know, he is a writer with the talent to bring his story home to his readers. As Best Intentions (based on an actual case) unfolds, its threat becomes more and more real. This could happen to anyone. It could happen to you.

On the surface, the court-appointed case that lands on young Dean Abernathy''s desk is a biggie; he is slated to defend a homeless man accused of the felony murder of the popular black New York City Police commissioner during an early-morning mugging attempt. But at second look, the case promises to be a routine conviction. The evidence is overwhelming. The police have come up with an eyewitness, they have physical evidence, and Joey Spadafino has given the arresting officers a signed confession.

Dean''s course seems obvious: Get Joe Spadafino, an ex-con, to plead guilty, bargain for the most lenient sentence possible, and figure you can''t win ‘em all.

Before he can talk to his client about a plea bargain, however, he finds that the prosecutor has already offered one - which Joey refuses. Dean, not only a conscientious defense attorney but a former investigator, starts looking harder at the seemingly incontrovertible evidence.

What he turns up changes a foregone conclusion into something very different. The district attorney, although outwardly cooperative, seems to be trying to keep Dean from interviewing the eyewitness - and the reason becomes apparent when Dean, challenged, digs deeper into her background. Anomalies and discrepancies in the government''s case crop up.

Dean realizes that he is drawing closer to a particularly nasty truth, one that not only puts his life and those of others in immediate peril but confronts him with a moral dilemma that is even more difficult to face.

Deep in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains sits a mansion, its image reflected perfectly on the still water of Flat Lake. Inside that estate are the savagely murdered bodies of a wealthy elderly couple.

All evidence points to Jonathan - their mentally handicapped twenty-eight-year-old grandson - but Matt Fielder, his appointed defense lawyer, isn''t convinced. While Fielder is pretty sure Jonathan committed the killings, Jonathan''s childlike understanding of the world renders it nearly impossible for him to have done it out of greed or malice. Now Fielder must fight the prosecution''s campaign for the death penalty, but as he scours Jonathan''s past for anything that will help their case, he uncovers a cache of dark family secrets that turn the case in a shocking and unexpected new direction.

When his first novel, Felony Murder, was published, Publishers Weekly called Klempner "a writer to watch." Now, Klempner is better than ever - that rare novelist with both an insider''s knowledge of the world he writes about, and a talent for intelligent, compelling storytelling.