Here's the thing about baby boomers - love us or hate us, we changed the world. Think about it. Did anyone use the words "lactose intolerant" before we came along?

By 1972, the country was torn apart by the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and social experiments by the boomers with sex and drugs. The pill and abortion were here to stay. All of this with a back drop of general distrust for all authority by a portion, but not all, of the world's best and brightest generation. At least that is what we thought.

Michael Hunter, at age 25, is a burned out, battle scarred veteran of the Public Defender's Office of San Joaquin County, California, and is the de facto leader of other misfit Public Defenders, known as the "third floor rats". None of these guys would probably make it anywhere else but there, because they can do only one thing. They WIN.

Eddie Reno is a transplanted want-to-be mobster from New Jersey, who after a minor fender bender out in the country, makes another bad choice and winds up raping and murdering a Kindergarten teacher, who happens to be the niece of the most politically powerful man in the San Joaquin Valley.

The case appears open and shut against Reno. But this guy has a secret he won't tell, that he is sure will walk him out of the back of the courtroom, if he can only get to trial as quickly as possible. He won't talk or cooperate with his lawyer, and through a variety of unfortunate circumstances, Hunter is assigned his case. It soon appears that unless Hunter can find out what Reno's secret is, some very important people are going to be taken down, along with Hunter and his crew.

Michael Hunter had been taken into the Italian home of Big John Moretti when he was fifteen years old. He had been raised on a farm in Kansas by his paternal grandmother, a former prostitute and bootlegger, who struck oil with her husband who promptly died of Tuberculosis. Michael's father had no use for him and left shortly after his birth. His mother, an aspiring actress, who spent more time on the casting couch then she did on the set, couldn't be bothered with a baby. She gave Michael to his grandmother when he was eight months old. When his grandmother suddenly died when Michael was thirteen, he was shipped off to his alcoholic aunt and uncle's home in Stockton, California, so that they could get their hands on his inheritance.

Big John Moretti knew people that were good to know in the Italian community, and when he saw that Michael had been beaten up yet again by his uncle, he took action. Michael came to live with Big John and his wife and son, and the aunt and uncle were run out of town.

Michael Hunter grew up tough with a moral flexibility borne from survival. He believed that he was only good at one thing, trying criminal cases, and that you need to live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse. Operating under the mistaken belief that because he had won almost all of his trials, that he could exist outside the rules, never making any real emotional connections, he was about to find out what a fantasy that existence really was when Eddie Reno was dumped into his life.