Legal Crime Fiction

In the Company of Liars is that rare animal - a truly original thriller, strikingly fresh and unpredictable. Told chronologically in reverse, from its enigmatic end to its brilliant beginning, it's centered around a woman on trial for murder - Allison Pagone, who is caught between competing forces, each represented by someone who may not care if the pressure kills her in the end.

Questa non sarà un’autopsia di routine. L’anatomopatologa Maura Isles ne è certa. Ad attenderla, all’ospedale, c’è lei: Madame X, coperta interamente da bende di lino impregnate di resina, che risalgono a duemila anni prima. I suoi organi interni sono stati asportati, solo il cuore è rimasto al suo posto, perché è lì che gli antichi egizi credevano risiedesse l’intelligenza. Madame X infatti è una mummia, ritrovata per caso negli scantinati di un museo. Quando la TAC arriva alle gambe, Maura scorge qualcosa di impossibile.

It starts with a phone call Mike Daley never expected, from District Attorney Prentice Marshall Gates III, San Francisco's chief law enforcement officer and front-runner candidate for California attorney general. Friends they're not, but Gates needs Daley now - badly. He's just been arrested. A couple of hours earlier he woke up in his hotel room and found the dead body of a young male prostitute in the bed.

Mike and Rosie learn that their daughter's boyfriend has been arrested on suspicion of murdering his father. Bobby Fairchild claims to have found his father's body upon returning home from a date with Grace. The police, who found Bobby at the scene of the crime holding the murder weapon, contend that his parents' acrimonious divorce sent the boy over the edge. With their daughter as Bobby's only alibi, Mike and Rosie take the case and uncover a sex scandal that takes them down San Francisco's darkest alleys.

Eric’s wife, Anne, has followed the advice of handsome lawyer Mark Fenham and invested a small fortune in a merchant bank also involved in underwriting marine insurance. Now her company must pay out a vast insurance claim for the Sea Dawn, a ship sunk in Spanish waters. Eric Ward smells fraud. His wife could lose everything. And then, one by one, people connected to the Sea Dawn start to die. The murderous trail takes Ward to sunny Spain—where he comes face-to-face with his arch enemy. Will Ward uncover the truth about the sinking of the Sea Dawn?

Ruthless defense attorney Tatum Graham has been living large in Miami, but when his recently acquitted client claims another victim, Tatum has a crisis of conscience. Disillusioned, he heads to his small Utah hometown for a simpler life...but that’s not what he finds. Soon after he arrives, Tatum’s childhood crush offers him a job at the county attorney’s office and assigns him a murder case.

Eric Ward is still uneasy on the board of merchant bankers Martin & Channing. Their defense against a hostile takeover is pushing the limits of the law. But Eric soon has problems nearer home: his wife’s colleague is charged with the murder of his fiancée in his London flat. He asks Eric to represent him. Eric discovers some very interesting facts about the dead woman. Then Eric is called back to London to deal with the takeover gone wrong.

In the dead of night, Josie Bates is ripped from sleep by the sounds of an epic storm raging over Hermosa Beach and a man beating on her door begging her to help Billy Zuni who is drowning in the raging sea. She arrives at the shore just in time to see the teenager pulled from the water, battered and near death. Ready to kill Billy's selfish, neglectful mother, Josie rushes to the Zuni house only to find someone has beaten her to it. Two men lie dead downstairs and Billy's mother clings to life on the floor above.

In the sixth volume of the best-selling Joe Dillard series, Dillard does something he has never done before - he hires a young associate. Her name is Charleston Story, she is bright and beautiful, and in her very first case, she winds up inheriting an item so valuable that it threatens to destroy her and everything she cares about. As Dillard tries to help and advise his young protégé, he finds himself dragged into a web of danger and intrigue, a web so thick that he may never be able to extract himself.

A man shoots his young wife to death. He drives to a freeway overpass, gets out, shoots himself, and drops 100 feet to the freeway below, crushing a Toyota Camry. Inside is an elementary school teacher named Jacqueline Dwyer, who dies at the scene. Ty Buchanan is a hotshot lawyer. Jacqueline Dwyer was the woman he was going to marry. Ty goes into a tailspin. And it gets worse when a mysterious man finds him at the funeral and says Jacqueline's death may not have been an accident after all.

Robin Lockwood is a young criminal defense attorney and partner in a prominent law firm in Portland, Oregon. A former MMA fighter and Yale Law graduate, she joined the firm of legal legend Regina Barrister not long before Regina was forced into retirement by early onset Alzheimer's. One of Regina's former clients, Robert Chesterfield, shows up in the law office with an odd request—he's seeking help from his old attorney in acquiring patent protection for an illusion. Chesterfield is a professional magician of some reknown and he has a major new trick he's about to debut.

Teen pop star Brittany Crutcher is found dead in small-town Tennessee. For attorney Bocephus Haynes, it’s just another night in Pulaski. Bo swore off criminal work after his last case, but the beloved singer’s murder demands answers. The prime suspect is local high school football hero and the victim’s boyfriend, Odell Champagne. However, this fallen athlete is one of Bo’s son’s best friends. Bo knows this young man and does not believe him capable of the crime. When Odell is charged with murder, Bo reluctantly takes the case, sparking outrage throughout the town.

As husband and wife, Mike Daley and Rosie Fernandez couldn't make it work. But as partners in one of San Francisco's most tenacious law firms, Daley and Fernandez make one hell of a team. Judgment Day finds the ex-spouses tackling their most difficult case yet. Called in at the last minute to try to stop the execution of Nathan Fineman, a former mob lawyer convicted of murdering three people in the back room of Chinatown's notorious Golden Dragon Restaurant, Mike and Rosie must race the clock.

Faced with evidence of stunning prosecutorial misconduct, a San Francisco judge has ordered a new trial for the Maxwell brothers' father, Lawrence, who was convicted of killing their mother 21 years before. A prison snitch soon turns up dead, with Lawrence the only suspect, and Leo teams up with hotshot attorney Nina Schuyler to defend Lawrence against murder charges both old and new.

William Benson knows what it's like to be accused of something you didn't do - the fear, the vulnerability and the nightmare of watching your life unravel. Now he speaks on behalf of those who have no voice, defending anyone who claims to be innocent. This time, it's Karmen Naylor, estranged daughter of a south London crime boss, fighting a murder charge and desperate to be believed. But Benson becomes trapped into a grudge match between two rival clans, endangering himself and those he loves.

Though some think they saw a ghost, it was a real, live woman in the (mostly exposed) flesh flitting through Sierra Vista Park. Eleanor Corbin has a taste for trouble - and a talent for getting out of it using the most outrageous means to cover her tracks. Now her scandalized half-sister, Olga, fears Eleanor may be using lascivious antics to camouflage more larcenous acts.

Rafael Zhettah relishes the simplicity and freedom of his life. He is the owner and head chef of a promising Houston restaurant, a pilot with open access to the boundless Texas horizon, and a bachelor, content with having few personal or material attachments that ground him. Then, lightning strikes. When he finds Tieresse - billionaire, philanthropist, sophisticate, bombshell - sitting at one of his tables, he also finds his soul mate, and his life starts again.

Mike Daley doesn't go to confession much since he left the priesthood twenty years ago and became a lawyer, but that doesn't stop his old friend, Father Ramon Aguirre, from trying to get him there. "It wouldn't kill you to go to church once in a while," he tells Mike. But it does kill someone. For several months, a ruinous sexual harassment suit has been building against the San Francisco Catholic Archdiocese, and when the plaintiff's lawyer is found dead, an almost audible sigh of relief is heard.

Criminal Defense Attorney Mitch Turner is awoken in the middle of the night by a message from his nerdy law school employee Timothy Cooper begging Mitch for help. Uncertain about the problem from Timothy's cryptic texts, Mitch Turner slips into his suit and heads over to visit Timothy, unable to imagine any reason why Timothy would be calling for help at such a late hour. Mitch arrives to find the police at Timothy's apartment and learns that Timothy's roommate was murdered.

When it comes to swimming with the sharks, there is no bigger kahuna than Serge Storms. Bingeing on a marathon of legal movies set in Florida, Serge finds his vocation: the law. Never mind law school or that degree; Serge becomes a freelance fixer - wildcat paralegal and pilgrim to the hallowed places where legal classics of the big screen such as Body Heat, Cool Hand Luke, and Absence of Malice were filmed practically in his own backyard.