4th of July

4th of July is a mystery and legal thriller by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro, published in 2005.

Lindsay Boxer, a lieutenant in the San Francisco police, answers a call with her partner and ends up in a chase that becomes a shootout: two teenagers in a car draw weapons, both officers are hit, and the girl is killed when Boxer returns fire. The city charges her with wrongful death, the case becomes a national story, and she is suspended from duty while her lawyer prepares her defence. The trial is followed by the whole country, and the questions it raises about how a police shooting should be judged travel with her through the months before a verdict. With the hearing ahead of her she retreats to her sister's house in Half Moon Bay, where she begins reading about a series of killings that look like the work of somebody she failed to catch ten years earlier, and she joins the local police in looking into them.

Patterson wrote the novel with Maxine Paetro, and it belongs to his sequence of thrillers about Lindsay Boxer and her colleagues in San Francisco.