In 1986, a Virginia attorney named Sheila McGough took on the case of a con artist named Bob Bailes. First she defended this charming chiseler against a charge of bank fraud, and lost; then, two years later, she went to bat for him when he was indicted for a bizarre, insurance-related bunco game. Again she lost, and Bailes--whose tale-spinning amounted to a kind of artistry--remained in the slammer. At this point, most advocates would have moved on. Not McGough: "After her client went to prison, she continued defending him as if nothing had happened.... She remained at his side and fought for him as if he were Alfred Dreyfus, instead of the small-time con man, with an unfortunate medical history and an interesting imagination, that he was." Nothing, it turns out, clogs the machinery of the judicial system more thoroughly than an honest--okay, pathologically honest--attorney. Reviewed on Amazon.com

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