Milton Hirsch

The Wheel of Justice Milton Hirsch

Miami circuit judge Clark N. Addison is in for more than a few surprises when he switches from criminal court to civil court. The Holtzman Museum of Judaica, a prestigious institution on Miami Beach, is locked in litigation with an equally prestigious and wealthy doctor over the fate of a unique art collection. The collection comprises almost the entire work of Ernst Adler, an Austrian-born Jewish artist. Adler had produced little of artistic note while living in Paris and Barcelona in the 1920s and early 1930s; but it is a legend of modern European art history that when Adler -- along with so many other Jewish intellectuals, artists, and scholars -- was tossed by the Nazis into the Weeghman concentration camp, he experienced a kind of artistic epiphany. Working on scraps of paper, scraps of cloth, scraps of mattresses, any surface he could find, he produced an extraordinary body of art. That body of art was thought by some art critics to have been lost when the Third Reich collapsed, and by other art critics to have been nothing more than a myth. But the doctor in Clark's lawsuit is certainly Adler's grandson, and he has claimed for many years to possess the Adler collection. The prospect of a public exhibition of the Adler collection has the art world buzzing. Trial has barely begun, however, when attorneys for the museum interrupt to ask that the judge follow them out of the courtroom. They lead him into the stairwell where, halfway down a flight of stairs lies the dead body of their next witness. He was a very elderly man, a survivor of Weeghman, but his death is clearly unrelated to his age or his past suffering. Lying almost on top of him is a young, African-American woman, identified as the secretary of another judge in the civil courthouse. She, too, has been beaten to death. There is no weapon on the scene; the two decedents had never crossed paths in their lives: Two murders, but with no motives, no means, no rhyme or reason. Judge Addison's job is to try the art-collection case, nothing more. But a double murder occurred in the middle of his trial, within a few feet of his courtroom, and although he is determined to resolve his civil case, he is just as determined to solve the murders -- even if it means solving a mystery that goes back to the Holocaust itself.