John Grisham made the contemporary legal thriller into a best-selling genre. Paul Goldstein has transformed the genre into an art form.

Mr. Goldstein's protagonist is an intellectual property lawyer named Michael Seeley, a reformed alcoholic and former high-powered New York City corporate attorney. After the adventures he experienced in Mr. Goldstein's first novel, Errors and Omissions, he has retreated to his native Buffalo, N.Y., and the consolation of a small legal practice. Then his only sibling, a doctor and medical adviser to a Northern California biotech firm, shows up at his office to hire him as main counsel for a federal patent law case. The former lead counsel has somewhat inconveniently committed suicide, so Seeley puts his solitude and his doubts about the case behind him and flies west.