The Alibi

The Alibi is a thriller by the American writer Sandra Brown, published in 1999.

Its central figure is Hammond Cross, a special assistant county solicitor in South Carolina who comes from one of Charleston's wealthy families and has spent his working life trying not to depend on it. The case he is handed is a murder, and the difficulty he runs into is personal: a woman he has become involved with turns out to be connected to the investigation, so that the case he has to make and the life he wants are pulling in different directions. Brown writes the book as a legal thriller with a romance inside it, and the plot is built out of the question of who is protecting whom, with the answer arriving later than the reader expects. It is one of a group of her novels set in the same part of South Carolina, and the legal world of Charleston, its courts, its family connections and its assumptions, is as much the setting as the city itself.