Legal Fiction Thrillers

It’s the most sensational case of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Jessica Silver, heiress to a billion-dollar real estate fortune, vanishes on her way home from school, and her teacher, Bobby Nock, a 25-year-old African American man, is the prime suspect. The subsequent trial taps straight into America’s most pressing preoccupations: race, class, sex, law enforcement, and the lurid sins of the rich and famous.

In this work Horace Rumpole returns to delight us with seven new cases. We find our hero jousting with the Devil, being wooed by a beautiful violin player, and even up before the Disciplinary Tribunal of the Bar Council.

At first, the death of millionaire businessman Charles Parsons seems like a straightforward suicide. There’s no sign of forced entry or struggle in his lavish New Jersey mansion - just a single gunshot wound from his own weapon. But days later, a different story emerges. Computer techs pick up a voice recording that incriminates Parsons’ adoptive daughter, Ann, who duly confesses and pleads guilty.

Harry Flashman: the unrepentant bully of Tom Brown's schooldays, now with a Victoria Cross, has three main talents - horsemanship, facility with foreign languages, and fornication. A reluctant military hero, Flashman plays a key part in most of the defining military campaigns of the 19th century, despite trying his utmost to escape them all. If only Flashman had got on with his dinner and ignored the handkerchief dropped by a flirtatious hussy in a Calcutta hotel....

Winner of the British Book Awards, Lifetime Achievement Award, 2007.
Adam Hill is 26 years old and in his first year at a top Chicago law firm. He volunteers for the toughest assignment any lawyer could ask for. His prospective client doesn't want Adam or his law firm. Why would he take on Adam, a complete novice, to defend him? And why would Adam want his case so desperately?

Deep in the heart of winter, things are beginning to shift for the Zoo Crew. Drake Bell is wrapping up his last days in law school and preparing to take the bar exam. Kade Keuhl has finally relented and agreed to apply for his private investigator's license. The ski lift at the local Snow Plaza has grounded everybody from hitting the slopes. And Emily, Drake's former college flame, is back in town looking to make him an offer that could alter everything moving forward.

A young, ambitious lawyer is eager to prove he is better than the mobster dominated family he grew up in. Working as a Bronx Legal Aid attorney he learns how to become an unbeatable defense lawyer. But it's 1982. The Spiderman rapist is on the loose and New York City is a city in fear. When an outraged victim commits suicide right before his eyes, searching for absolution and determined to prove his client's innocence, he knocks the pegs out from under the prosecution's case.

A Washington, DC, lawyer and a frequent major media commentator on the Supreme Court, Anthony Franze delivers a high-stakes story of family, power, loss, and revenge set within the insular world of the highest court of our country. Among Washington, DC, power players, everyone has secrets they desperately want to keep hidden, including Sean Serrat, a Supreme Court lawyer. Sean transformed his misspent youth into a model adulthood and now has one of the most respected legal careers in the country.

Alex Vogel has always been a high achiever who lived her life by the book - star student and athlete in high school, prelaw whiz in college, Harvard Law School degree. Accepting a dream offer at the prestigious Manhattan law firm of Klasko & Fitch, she promises her sweet and supportive longtime boyfriend that the job won’t change her. Yet Alex is seduced by the firm’s money and energy....

When Josh’s longtime partner, Grace, dies in a tragic accident, he is left with a mess of grief - and full custody of her seven-year-old son, Logan. Wanting to do right by Logan, Josh begins the process of becoming his legal guardian - something that seems suddenly urgent, though Grace always brushed it off as an unnecessary formality. But now, as Josh struggles to find the paperwork associated with Logan’s birth, he begins to wonder whether there were more troubling reasons for Grace’s reluctance to make their family official.

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.

No one mourned when San Francisco DA Wes Farrell put Paul Riley in prison eleven years ago for the rape and murder of his girlfriend. And no one is particularly happy to see him again when he’s released after The Exoneration Initiative uncovered evidence that pinned the crime on someone else. In fact, Riley soon turns up murdered, surrounded by the loot from his latest scam. But if Riley was really innocent all along, who wanted him dead?

The irrepressible, audacious defence barrister Horace Rumpole whose court scenes are proverbial, and whose home is ruled by Mrs Rumpole, is back in these short stories by John Mortimer. The much loved stories were adapted from his scripts for the hugely popular TV series of the same name.

Abby Cooper senses a convicted killer is innocent, but she'll need hard evidence to save the woman before it's too late.... A ticked-off judge has tossed Abby in the slammer for contempt of court, and during her brief but unpleasant stay she learns the story of a condemned woman who is facing a far more serious sentence. Skylar Miller has been found guilty of murder and faces the death penalty. Everyone believes she's guilty, including her own family and her ex-husband - everyone, that is, except Abby.

Change never comes easy, but it comes just the same, and it's on its way to the Park, to Niniltna, in southeast Alaska. This time it concerns the possibility of drilling for oil in a wildlife preserve near there, near Aleutian P.I. Kate Shugak's home territory. Battle lines are drawn across their community, but at least it gives Kate something to do. Still just months after her lover's violent death, though she doesn't know quite how, she is trying to get back into her daily life.

Attorney Ken McClain has nothing to live for. Nine years after the accident that claimed the life of his wife and two sons, he's finally given up. Alone in his empty house, it seems suicide is his only escape. Now the question of death by pills or by bullet? Then suddenly the phone rings, and it turns out to be a case he can't refuse. A case for the life of accused killer Peter Thomason, and a case for his own soul.

Determined to enjoy the pace of small-town life, lawyer Sam Johnstone has left his painful past behind and looks forward to taking each new day as it comes. Yet just as he sees peace and tranquility on the horizon, a close friend is charged with murder. Unable to stand quietly by, Sam quickly signs on for the defense. But how can he defend a client who has already confessed to the crime? Further complicating matters, an ethically challenged prosecutor with an ax to grind seems embarked on a personal crusade against Sam.

Penn Cage is no stranger to death. As a Houston prosecutor he sent 16 men to death row, and watched seven of them die. But now, in the aftermath of his wife's death, the grief-stricken father packs up his four-year-old daughter, Annie, and returns to his hometown in search of healing. But peace is not what he finds there.

In this first installment of the Brad Madison novel series, Madison finds himself defending Patrick Strickland against a mounting evidence base. Despite Strickland claiming he has no criminal connections, there are clear signs his involvement in organized crime runs deep. When the case receives national attention, the underbelly of power in LA is thrown into the limelight. Madison fights desperately to find the one piece of evidence that will prove his client's innocence. But where there's power, there's danger. The further Madison digs for the truth, the more he puts his life at risk.

A newly elected president faces the unexpected chance to nominate a new chief justice of the Supreme Court. His first choice is a nationally respected Court of Appeals judge, a woman whose nomination faces two serious obstacles: a long-held personal secret; and the prospect that a volatile abortion case - a trial pitting a 15-year-old girl against her pro-life parents - will come before the court. And the Senate majority leader is determined to thwart the president's nomination for reasons that cross the boundary between the political and the personal.