"You can pick your friends, they say, but you can't pick your family. And lately, Mike Daley's family has been keeping him very busy. An ex-priest, ex-public defender, and ex-corporate lawyer, Daley and his former wife, Rosie Fernandez, run their own San Francisco criminal defense firm - they weren't so good at being married, they discovered, but they are a pretty good legal team. Most of their cases are fairly small-time, which is why it is surprising for the person accused of murdering movie director Richard (Big Dick) MacArthur to be calling them - except that the accused is Rosie's own niece Angelina." That case is bad enough, but the family problems don't end there: Rosie's brother, Tony, may be on the wrong end of a strongarm graft proposal; the son of one of the firm's lawyers has just been busted on a drug charge; Mike is having a clandestine affair with a woman judge...and Rosie herself has a dark secret that may make all of it seem irrelevant.