Legal English

When racial tension erupts in the sleepy community of Colleton County, North Carolina, Deborah is caught off guard. She is happily tending her own home fires: her simmering romance with Kidd Chapin, the house she's building on her family's land, and her campaign for reelection as district judge. But then the first black church is burned, and all of Deborah's alarms go off.

Last seen in 1997's Flesh & Bones, Jake Lassiter is a hero unlike any other in the courtroom. Booklist called him "one of the most entertaining series characters in contemporary crime fiction." The former Miami Dolphin is still swimming with sharks in his latest, boldest novel of suspense yet. Amy Larkin is in town, looking for her sister Krista, who vanished without a trace almost two decades earlier. She seeks out Lassiter because he's the last person to have seen her alive.

Defense attorney Leland Monroe lost it all: his big-city job, his reputation, and, worst of all, his loving wife. Now he’s back in his hometown to hit restart and repair the relationship with his troubled son. But the past is always present in a small town. Leland returns to find his high school sweetheart hasn’t had the easiest of lives - especially now that her son faces a death sentence for murdering his father.

Former police officer-turned-solicitor Eric Ward is recovering from a serious eye operation when the offer comes in. Come down to London. Help Philip Scarn, a successful entrepreneur, break into the North East. Get paid handsomely doing it. On the journey, Ward is nearly killed. At the other end of a phone call, a shadowy voice warns this is just the beginning. Then a young woman is murdered.

When a drive-by shooting in Holyoke, Massachusetts, claims the lives of a Puerto Rican drug dealer and a nurse at a neighborhood clinic, the police arrest a black drug dealer. With no death penalty in Massachusetts, the US attorney shifts the double homicide out of state jurisdiction into federal court so that he can pursue the death penalty.

Landon Reed is an ex-quarterback convicted of organizing a points-shaving scheme. During his time in prison, he found forgiveness and faith and earned his law degree. Now he longs for an opportunity to prove his loyalty and worth. Be careful what you ask for. Harry McNaughton is one of the founding partners of McNaughton & Clay and the only lawyer willing to take a chance employing an ex-con-turned-lawyer.

Best-selling author Linda Fairstein, who "makes legal issues more exciting than any high-speed chase" ( The New York Times), presents these thrilling stories of lawyers under pressure, criminals facing the needle, and heartbroken families who hope for justice and who sometimes take it into their own hands.

Barbara Holloway is a trial lawyer who tends to take on difficult cases, but this time it seems there's no defense at all. It appears that Vinny Jessup died when his car rolled over on a bad curve on Lookout Mountain. Then the sheriff finds the gunshot wound. With a large insurance policy as her motive, could his much younger wife have staged the death?

Newly licensed attorney Aspen Wilde joins Denver’s largest law firm to discover that an attractive, up-and-coming associate mysteriously vanished several months earlier and is presumed dead. She secretly embarks upon a brilliant but dangerous plan to trap the killer, only to find herself increasingly intertwined in a complex web of murders involving several different women killed in very different ways.

A Washington, DC, defense attorney, Stanton Shaw keeps his head cool, his questions sharp, and his arguments irrefutable. They don't call him the Jury Charmer for nothing - with his Southern drawl, disarming smile, and captivating green eyes, he's a hard man to say no to. Men want to be him, and women want to be thoroughly cross-examined by him.

Butch Karp has never shied away from a difficult case, and when Croatian terrorists hijack a plane and kill an NYPD bomb squad cop in a bomb blast, he’s eager to prosecute the high-profile killers. But Karp’s aggression puts him at risk when his investigations uncover messy government secrets. Certain elements of the FBI and CIA don’t want the trial to go forward, and are willing to go to extremes to sabotage Karp's case.

Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer, a criminal defense pro who operates out of the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car, to defend clients at the bottom of the legal food chain. It's no wonder that he is despised by cops, prosecutors, and even some of his own clients. But an investigator is murdered for getting too close to the truth and Haller quickly discovers that his search for innocence has taken him face to face with a kind of evil as pure as a flame.

Jack Dana is a former marine infantry officer and Force Recon platoon leader. He is also the author of three successful books. It may seem odd that someone like Jack - honor graduate of the corps' toughest combat schools - should become a novelist. But there's the other side of Jack: the Yale graduate, the only child of a Harvard philosophy professor father and a flutist mother who played with a Boston-based chamber orchestra. As Jack would say, "The truth is that to everything there is a season."

What do you get when you mix beautiful people, family secrets, and a yacht washed up on Sunset Key with a hundred grand in cash and a dying man? Steve Solomon sees a case that can get Solomon & Lord off the ground. But Victoria Lord spies a golden opportunity to go out on her own.

As the Avenger of Blood systematically executes guilty rapists and the lawyers who finagled their freedom, a reporter has visions of this relentless vigilante in action. To her amazement, she soon finds herself in the slammer, accused of being the notorious serial killer. Deep in despair, she retains an attorney who specializes in the insanity plea.

When he was a kid, Teddy Wendover had an accident that left him stunted at the mental age of eight. Physically, he's six-foot-two and 28-years-old, but he acts and thinks just like a little boy. Could this big little boy be a killer?

Abused from the age of eight by her older brother and then her step-father, Maureen Wood quickly became numb to the constant suffering. But Maureen’s world crumbled when her own mother started to abuse her too. A Family Secret is the harrowing true story of how one little girl survived sickening abuse by the people who should have loved her most and how an innocent baby finally saved her.

Barbara Holloway is a low-key attorney in Eugene, Oregon, who left her father’s high-powered firm to handle small legal problems for local residents and ponder her next move. But while trying to sort out her own future, two people, desperate for help, show up on her doorstep: former pro football player Martin Owens and his wife, Binnie. Binnie, who is mute, met her husband when she sneaked aboard his boat while it was docked in Haiti and smuggled herself into the US.

We are all familiar with the image of the immensely clever judge who discerns the best rule of common law for the case at hand. But is this common-law mindset, which is appropriate in its place, suitable also in statutory and constitutional interpretation? In a witty and trenchant essay, Justice Scalia answers this question with a resounding negative.

It seems straightforward to Attorney Nate Shepherd: a middle-aged billionaire dies while celebrating at a wedding reception. The grief-stricken family lashes out, though, blaming the billionaire’s date for his death. When the family brings all of its power to bear, the wheels of local justice threaten to overwhelm the woman. As Nate Shepherd steps in to defend her, he tries to deflect the misplaced anger that’s directed at the woman for the tragedy. But as the investigation progresses, a tangled history unravels, including unexpected ties to Nate’s own life.