Can a reporter know too much? Yes, when what he knows and how he knows it jeopardizes the efforts of local authorities to find, try, and convict the persons who shot and killed three children and left their babysitter for dead.

People just didn't shoot people for no reason in rural, Midwestern Austin County in 1994. Not then. Not ever. Yet, the night before Halloween in Aunt Lotty's double-wide, somebody did. They shot and killed three children and left Lotty, their babysitter, for dead. It's an appalling story that rekindles in Clay Ambrose the reckless "enthusiasms" of his work. A crime reporter, whose alcoholism and loss of wonder have knocked him back to a low rung of his career, Clay takes advantage of a young cop and invites himself into the crime scene. That choice and the choices he and others subsequently make put him at odds with Potter Crandall, the surly, profane prosecutor handling the case, and may very well cause a psychopath to walk free. Part procedural, part courtroom drama, Fourth Person No More is Clay's sassy meditation on what people know, what they choose to do with what they know, and the risks of wrong choices.

John Gastineau is a retired attorney, who worked as a book editor and as a newspaper reporter, photographer, and editor before earning his law degree. He is the author of a previous thriller, "The Judge's Brief." Gastineau lives with his wife in Indiana.