From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Guilt and The 13th Juror comes an electrifying new thriller--a novel in which San Francisco defense attorney Dismas Hardy faces the case of his career. This time his family is involved--and for Hardy, a devoted husband and father, the stakes have never been higher. Dismas knows his wife, Frannie, is the most reliable of mothers. When she fails to pick up their children from school one afternoon, he's convinced something terrible has happened. It has: Frannie Hardy is in jail. Called before the grand jury in a murder investigation, she refused to reveal a secret entrusted to her by a man whose children attend the same school as hers, a friend who is accused of killing his wife. But now he has disappeared. Hardy knows there's only one way to get Frannie out of jail: clear her friend of murder. That is, if he can be found. As he moves through a labyrinthine world of big business and San Francisco politics, looking for a man he half hopes never to find, a furious and frustrated Hardy is struggling to understand why his impeccably faithful wife is being so loyal to another man. What kind of truth could keep a wife from her husband, a mother from her children--could hold Hardy so powerless before the wrath of the law? With an unparalleled ability to illuminate the complexities of relationships while weaving a story of breathtaking suspense, Lescroart has never been in finer form. And  Nothing But the Truth  is his finest hour. "The novel's pacing is reminiscent of classic Ross Macdonald, where a week's worth of events are condensed into a few hours . . . [a] winning thriller."— Publishers Weekly (starred review) "San Francisco attorney Dismas Hardy [is] at his most engaging here…a true star in the lawyer-hero firmament." Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Dismas Hardy is such a likable main character that his very presence keeps the story grounded…very entertaining.” — Chicago Tribune "A master." — USA Today John Lescroart is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous legal thrillers and mysteries, most of them set in contemporary San Francisco. Among his novels are The Fall , The Keeper , The Ophelia Cut , The Hunt Club, The Second Chair, The First Law, Nothing but the Truth, and Dead Irish, as well as two novels featuring Auguste Lupa, the reputed son of Sherlock Holmes. At the tail end of a dog of a morning, Dismas Hardy was beginning to fear that he would also be spending the whole stiflingly dull afternoon in municipal court on the second floor of the Hall of Justice in San Francisco. He was waiting--interminably since nine a.m.--for his client to be admitted into the courtroom. This would not have been his first choice for how to celebrate his forty-eighth birthday. Now again the clerk called out someone not his client--this time a young man who looked as though he'd been drinking since he'd turned twenty-one and possibly two or three years before that. Maybe he was still drunk--certainly he looked wasted. The judge was Peter Li, a former assistant district attorney with whom Hardy was reasonably friendly. The prosecuting attorney was Randy Huang, who sat at his table inside the bar rail as the defendant went shuffling past. The public defender was a ten-year veteran named Donna Wong. Judge Li's longtime clerk, another Asian named Manny See, read the charge against the young man as he stood, swaying, eyes opening and closing, at the center podium. The judge addressed him. "Mr. Reynolds, you've been in custody now for two full days, trying to get to sober, and your attorney tells me you've gotten there. Is that true?" "Yes, Your Honor," Donna Wong declared quickly. Judge Li nodded patiently, but spoke in a firm tone. "I'd like to hear it from Mr. Reynolds himself, Counsellor. Sir?" Reynolds looked up, swayed for a beat, let out a long breath, shook his head. "Mr. Reynolds." Judge Li raised his voice. "Look at me, please. Do you know where you are?" Donna Wong prodded him with her elbow. Reynolds looked down at her, up to the judge and his clerk, across to Huang sitting at the prosecution table. His expression took on a look of stunned surprise as he became aware of his surroundings, of the Asian faces everywhere he turned. "I don't know." A pause. "China?" But the courtroom humor, such as it was, mingled uneasily with tragedy and the sometimes cruel impersonality of the law. Twenty-five very long minutes after the drunken Mr. Reynolds had been removed from the courtroom, another case had been called, another defendant--not Hardy's--brought in. He was beginning to think that his own client wouldn't get his hearing and that another entire day would have been wasted. This was not all that unusual an occurrence. Everyone bitched about it, but no one seemed to be able to make things better. The new defendant was Joshua Bonder, and from the Penal Code section read out by the clerk, Hardy knew the charge was dealing amphe