The Ledger

14.7 Floater

In this episode (14.7), the body of a long-missing woman turns up floating in the Hudson River. After some brief investigation, Briscoe and Green identify the woman, and focus their investigation on her ex-husband. But when Serena Southerlyn begins digging into her marital troubles, she has a strange encounter with her high-powered divorce attorney that makes her suspicious that he is involved in something illegal. Soon enough, she and McCoy begin gathering evidence that the divorce attorney had an arrangement with a court clerk and a judge that was allowing him to win his cases and receive large awards for his clients. Branch reluctantly asks McCoy to pursue the matter, because the judge involved was, he says, the smartest student he ever had when he was a professor, and he told her she could become the first female governor of NY. So much for that. Based on the evidence, the new theory of the crime is that the dead woman, who was employed by the courts, discovered the scheme and threatened the lawyer that she would go public with it, and the lawyer killed her in retaliation. But further investigation convinces Southerlyn and McCoy that the judge herself was involved in the murder, and eventually --- spoiler coming --- McCoy gets her to confess in the closing moments of the show.

The episode is wittily written, even if some of the humor is a bit too straight-forward, especially in the first half of the show. Although the plot is complicated, it's never really confusing, and it's an entertaining episode.

Posted by adm at February 15, 2004 02:38 AM

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