Josie Baylor-Bates was once a successful defense attorney in Los Angeles, but following a traumatic experience with her last big case, she opts out of life in the fast lane and seeks refuge in Hermosa Beach working for a local law firm. She is content working in town during the week and spending her weekends hanging out in the tiny seaside community. Everything changes one day when she receives a phone call from her old college roommate. Her old friend, who’s in a state of distress, tells Bates that her 16-year-old daughter, Hannah Sheraton, has just been charged with the murder of an eminent Supreme Court judge, who just so happens to be the teen-ager’s step-grandfather. She pleads with Bates to represent her daughter and Bates finally agrees to take the case. Throughout the court proceedings, Bates can sense that something is afoot, and she later uncovers the shocking truth that could either redeem her young client or irrefutably harm those who associated with the case.

Bates’ thrilling account sounds like the stuff of a suspenseful legal mystery novel and in fact, it is. Written by a Rancho Palos Verdes resident and veteran author, Rebecca Forster, “Hostile Witness” is a book predominately set in Hermosa Beach and the first installment in a series of novels inspired by the same main character.

“The development of Josie was inspired by a judge who works in the downtown courts who is very tall and attractive, and she comes from a volleyball-playing family,” said Forster. “Her brothers played on the circuit and I just looked at her and thought it was really cool that you have this judge who is probably on the beach sometimes with her brothers playing volleyball, and I loved it. I originally placed her in Venice Beach, but I was having a really hard time getting this character to come alive. So, I spent a day and went down to Venice Beach and realized this character would not live there if you paid her. I realized she was a Hermosa Beach person. You have a wonderful sense of communal independence in Hermosa Beach where it has a small-town feel where everyone leaves you alone but it you need someone, there’s this community ready to help. That’s the sense I get down there. So, it fell into place once I put the character in Hermosa Beach.”

Originally from Long Beach, Forster has lived in Rancho Palos Verdes for the past seven years with her husband who is a Superior Court judge and her two sons. Forster graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University in Chicago and later returned to Southern California for a master’s degree in business administration from Loyola Marymount University. She worked in the advertising business for roughly 14 years before she changed careers and eventually became a full-time writer.

“I didn’t work creatively until I switched over to writing. I was one of those budget people,” said Forster. “I was an account supervisor and so I was the one who met face to face with the clients, read the marketing plans, worked on the budgets and traveled all over the place like a crazy person. My specialty was travel and fashion advertising, which was a lot of fun.”

During her tenure as an advertising executive, Forster met a woman who became a client and who was married to a well-known author. Following a business meeting, Forster and a few co-workers ended up on the subject of writing a book.

“I think people often do say, ‘Someday I’m going to write the great American novel.’ At one point I said, ‘Oh, I could write a book,’ and somebody else said, ‘Well, I dare you.’ That’s literally how it started,” recalled Forster.

Forster, who is now in her early 50s, began writing her first work around the age of 31. Since then, she has written 20 books (about a book each year) that span varying genres mostly on either politics or the law.

“Hostile Witness” is Forster’s sixth legal fiction that, like the others, incorporates a tone of suspense and mystery in her content that in the same spirit is perhaps like a John Grisham novel.

“At that time, I didn’t have kids and I had really nothing to do in the evenings. It sounded like a really fun challenge,” she said. “I didn’t immediately started writing from a creative standpoint. Since my background was in marketing, I decided to research how you get a book published and I began looking at all the different books out there in the market. The one thing I’ve always loved is the law. I get such a charge out of our legal system and true crime.”

Upon the completion of her first book, Forster sent out her work to publishing companies, and it was eventually purchased. Forster later became a USA Today best-selling author with the late 1990s work, “Keeping Counsel.” Signet Fiction, a subsidiary of the Penguin Group publishing house, published her latest work.

“I couldn’t believe it when my first book was bought. It was just amazing,” Forster remembered. “It’s really neat because my initial objective was literally to get everybody off my back for saying such a stupid thing as, ‘Oh, I can write a book.’ So it was the beginning of the end of my corporate career. It was like going to Las Vegas in that you put in one quarter after the next, thinking you’ll hit the jackpot, so I just kept writing and writing. About five years later I quit the corporate world and started writing full time. It was a very lucky break, it truly was.”

Forster writes for about four or five hours each day and cranks out at least 5,000 words on paper. She approaches writing by starting out with a legal issue that interests her and builds a story around it by first drafting a synopsis and developing her main characters.

“I absolutely adore this genre and I doubt I’ll leave it ever again because I like the research part of it,” added Forster. “I love the fact that so many dramatic things happen not just on a legal, courtroom level but on an emotional level as well. My husband is a judge, and he was once a prosecutor who specialized in organized crime and terrorism. We’ve been married for a long time and I spent a lot of time observing our friends who are also attorneys, FBI and DEA agents who passed through our lives. I just realized they are much like doctors in that they hold so many peoples’ lives in their hands, and I find that really dramatic.”

“Hostile Witness” is out in bookstores now. For more information, visit www.rebeccaforster.com.