Legal English

Alison has it all. A doting husband, adorable daughter, and a career on the rise - she's just been given her first murder case to defend. But all is never as it seems...Just one more night. Then I'll end it. Alison drinks too much. She's neglecting her family. And she's having an affair with a colleague whose taste for pushing boundaries may be more than she can handle. I did it. I killed him. I should be locked up. Alison's client doesn't deny that she stabbed her husband - she wants to plead guilty. And yet something about her story is deeply amiss.

Detective Lindsay Boxer is jogging along a beautiful San Francisco street when a fiery explosion rips through the neighborhood. A town house owned by an Internet millionaire is immediately engulfed in flames, and when Lindsay plunges inside to search for survivors, she finds three people dead. An infant who lived in the house cannot be found; and a mysterious message at the scene leaves Lindsay and the San Francisco Police Department completely baffled. Then a prominent businessman is found murdered under bizarre circumstances, with another mysterious message left behind by the killer.

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It starts with a phone call on Christmas Eve. Jeff King, the founder of Silicon Valley’s hottest tech start-up, was found dead in his mansion above Mission Dolores on San Francisco’s “Billionaires Row”. Lexy Low, a young woman he had met on a “sugar daddy” site, allegedly injected King with a lethal “hot shot” of heroin.

Modern-day Georgia. The state Supreme Court celebrates the opening of its new courthouse, but the chief justice - shot dead in his chambers - is late to the party. Enter ex-lawyer Chance Meridian. Pressed into service by an offer he cannot refuse, Chance launches the search for the bold killer. But dirty politics is part of Atlanta’s DNA. The town is full of secrets - secrets too damning to see the light of sunshine. And if Chance cannot crack the case and fast, the next murder on the court’s docket could be his own.

Rebecka Martinsson is heading home to Kiruna, the town she'd left in disgrace years before. A Stockholm attorney, Rebecka has a good reason to return: her friend, Sanna, whose brother has been horrifically murdered in the revivalist church his charisma helped create. Beautiful and fragile, Sanna needs someone like Rebecka to remove the shadow of guilt that is engulfing her, to forestall an ambitious prosecutor and a dogged policewoman.

A woman stumbles onto a dark road in rural Oregon - tortured, battered, and bound. She tells a horrific story about being kidnapped, then tortured, until she finally managed to escape. She was the lucky one - two other women, with similar burns and bruises, were found dead. The surviving victim identifies the house where she was held captive, and the owner, Alex Mason - a prominent local attorney - is arrested.

Life would seem to have gone well for George Mason. His days as a criminal defense lawyer are long behind him. At 59, he has sat as a judge on the Court of Appeals in Kindle County for nearly a decade. Yet, when a disturbing rape case is brought before him, the judge begins to question the very nature of the law and his role within it. What is troubling George Mason so deeply? Is it his wife's recent diagnosis? Or the strange and threatening e-mails he has started to receive?

Josie Baylor-Bates has a full plate caring for a troubled teen, but it's about to get fuller when her ex-cop lover, Archer, is accused of murdering his disabled stepson - a son Josie never knew he had. When Timothy Wren died at California's oldest amusement park, it appeared to be a tragic accident. But now Timothy's biological father and the district attorney are out for blood. Josie races against time to prove someone is framing Archer.

Alex Cooper awakens one morning to news of her own brutal murder. Soon, Manhattan's top sex-crimes prosecutor discovers that the actual victim is film star Isabella Lascar, who had sought refuge at Alex's private retreat. Now it is up to Alex to find the killer before another victim surfaces.

In Up Jumps the Devil, fast-moving progress is threatening to forever destroy the leisurely, heart-warming pace of Colleton County, North Carolina. District Court Judge Deborah Knott sees trouble brewing when plans for a new interstate highway start pushing up property values. Deborah finds herself calming the combatants with down-home wit, but when the squabbles escalate to murder, Deborah is forced to search for a killer uncomfortably close to home.

An uncomfortable weekend awaits LA family lawyer Sandy Moss when she makes her way to her hometown in New Jersey for the wedding of her cousin Stephanie, sweetly nicknamed Skinny. Uncomfortable, because Sandy is not really looking forward to seeing her family, but at least her boyfriend, Hollywood movie star Patrick McNabb, is by her side.

Defense attorneys and former spouses Mike Daley and Rosie Fernandez have come a long way from their days working in a converted martial arts studio above a Chinese restaurant. Rosie just won her second term as public defender, and Mike is the co-head of the Felony Division. The ex-spouses-with-benefits are enjoying their newly empty nest. Their daughter is a USC alum who is making movies at Pixar. Their son is a freshman at UC-Berkeley. Finally, there is a semblance of order in their lives. It doesn’t last long.

At the annual Harvest Festival carnival, while everyone else is playing games and having fun, someone commits murder. As Deborah investigates, she must struggle to win a carny's confidence while a dark web of dangerous secrets begins to unravel.

Mary DiNunzio is a trademark Lisa Scottoline heroine - she's strong, she's smart, and she's got plenty of attitude. In recent years, she's become a big-time business-getter at Rosato & Associates, but the last person she expects to walk into her office one morning - in mile-high stilettos - is super sexy Trish Gambone, her high school rival.

After three tours in Afghanistan, homeless and hooked on painkillers, Lenny was working to pull his life together. He gave Annie the last of his oxy pills to ease the pain from her shoulder injury. But when she was found dead in her tent the next morning, Lenny wound up in jail accused of killing her with fentanyl. After a year behind bars, Lenny was finally about to get his day in court. But the uncertainty of the coronavirus threatened to delay his justice further. The evidence is compelling: a bottle with Lenny’s name, fingerprints, and DNA is found in the tent of the decedent.

This is the first book to trace the fascinating parallel history of law and science from antiquity to modern times, showing how the two disciplines have always influenced each other - until recently. In the past few years, the scientific paradigm has shifted dramatically, from seeing the natural world as a kind of cosmic machine to understanding it as a network of fluidly interacting communities. But law is stuck in a mechanistic, 17th-century view that the world is made up of discrete individual parts.

As one of just a few judges licensed to try murder cases at the Old Bailey, the author has presided over many of the high-profile cases that all too often grab our attention in dramatic media headlines—for every unlawful death tells a story. But, unlike most of us, a judge doesn't get to turn the page and move on. Nor does the defendant, or the family of the victim, nor the many other people who populate the court room. Peeling apart six dramatic murder and manslaughter cases, Unlawful Killings removes this distinction between 'them' and 'us'.

When a high-end hooker crashes the party and ends up dead, shameful secrets of prominent men hang in the balance. The kind of secrets that get folks killed. Chance Meridian and his murder squad soon learn that the dead woman had a penchant for playing dangerous games with the wrong people. Powerful people—including a United States Senator whose decades-old hatred of Chance still burns hot. As past and present converge to put him in a vise, Chance discovers a hard truth about his line of work. Some cases can only be solved at the point of a gun.

Jim Walker is a lawyer – one of the best – and he's the type who doesn't need to practice much law to make a client's problems disappear. He's a fixer who enjoys the finer things in life, until someone fixes him for good at a posh party in one of Atlanta's swankiest mansions.