PAT FRIEDER – Signature Murder.   Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1998.

   I’ve not found out much about the author. This is the first in a set of two mystery novels to feature a semi-disbarred lawyer named Matty Donahue. The second she wrote is Privileged Communications (Bantam, pbo, June 2000), and other than that, I’ve found nothing else online that’s solid enough to say about her for sure.

   Inside the back cover of Signature Murder, though, is the following information: Like her series character Matty, Pat Frieder is a lawyer, and she lives in Albuquerque, NM. Matty lives in Sante Fe, however, and is unmarried. Her creator is also much more successful in her career, having once served as New Mexico’s Attorney General for Criminal Appeals.

   While Matty, on the other hand, is barely survinving, doing essentially grunt work for a prestigious law firm that gives her a dinky office she can barely turn around in – she’s essentially a charity case, having at one time lost her license because of her involvement in a situation very much like the one that’s at the center of this book.

   An eccentric elderly woman has been killed — mutilated in fact, with her hand cut off — and it may be Matty’s fault, since the handyman suspected of the deed had served time for a similar crime — hence the title — and it was Matty who brought him into the household.

   So, strictly against the wishes of the two partners of the firm she’s working for, she decides to solve the case on her own – and one of the trails leads straight back to one of those very same partners.

   There’s also an illegal immigrant from the Middle East who’s been romancing the dead woman’s maid, forgers of Native American artifacts, victims of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (to which Native Americans are very susceptible), a witness who’s disappeared, the grandson of a good friend of the dead woman who may inherit some money (not from the dead woman) if he’s still alive and not on drugs, a well-meaning but mostly inept public defender, and Matty’s former therapist, whose assistance is welcome but whose intentions regarding Matty could easily now be considered unethical.

   And I probably missed something. The first half to two-thirds of the book makes for very easy reading, but there’s simply too much in it (nearly 300 pages of small print) for it all to fit comfortably together, not to mention one question I have – and an important one – that never gets answered. The case does get solved, however, with the help of lots of clues, including a good many false ones, causing Matty a good deal of wear and tear before she’s finished.

   So it’s a good thing she’s a survivor, with at least one more adventure in her life that a book could be written about. Would I read it, if it were easily on hand? Yes, even with my complaints, Matty’s problems can easily become addictive, or so I’ve found out.