Legal Fiction

A young man with Down's syndrome has been convicted of burning down his care home and killing five people, but a fellow inmate at his secure psychiatric unit has hired Thora to prove Jakob is innocent. If he didn't do it, who did? And how is the multiple murder connected to the death of Magga, killed in a hit and run on her way to babysit?

In these witty and comic stories, Horace Rumpole takes on a variety of clients and activities. He, of course, brings each case to a successful end, all the while quoting poetry and drinking claret.

Detective Sergeant Washington Poe is in court, fighting eviction from his beloved and isolated croft, when he is summoned to a backstreet brothel in Carlisle where a man has been beaten to death with a baseball bat. Poe is confused—he hunts serial killers and this appears to be a straightforward murder-by-pimp—but his attendance was requested personally, by the kind of people who prefer to remain in the shadows. As Poe and the socially awkward programmer Tilly Bradshaw delve deeper into the case, they are faced with seemingly unanswerable questions.

The call comes at midnight. It looks like a tragic and petty murder - a rising star in San Francisco's legal firmament found shot in a dark alley. But for homicide lieutenant Abe Glitsky, the crime cuts horribly close to home - unknown to anyone, the victim was his daughter. Seething, Glitsky leans hard on his only suspect - a homeless heroin addict found lingering over his daughter's body, with her jewelry in his pocket and a smoking gun in his hand.

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.

In her new thriller, America's #1 best-selling Queen of Suspense delves into a legal battle over the guilt or innocence of a man accused of murdering his wife. Woven into her plot is an eerie, little-understood but documented medical phenomenon - the emergence of a donor's traits and memories in the recipient of a heart transplant.

Janae Simmons left the small town of Kedgewick, Virginia, ten years ago to pursue her legal career and never looked back—until a professional mistake leads her to her grandmother's historic carriage house and to the town where her past threatens to find her. The streets echo with her grandfather's sterling reputation, one that conflicts with fresh questions that claw at Janae, launching her on a reluctant journey to unearth his secrets. When her new job at a local law firm doesn't live up to expectations, she wonders if coming home was the right decision.

In The 13th Juror, Dismas Hardy, lawyer/investigator, undertakes the defense of Jennifer Witt, accused of murdering her husband and their eight-year-old son as well as her first husband, who had died nine years earlier from an apparent drug overdose. While preparing his case, Hardy learns that both of Jennifer's husbands had physically abused her. But Jennifer refuses to allow a defense that presumes her guilt. She is not guilty, she claims. Hardy is now driven to seek an alternative truth a jury can believe.

A legal and political thriller ripped from today’s headlines. Michael MacDougall volunteers for a medical aid charity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Traumatized by his experiences in Africa, he goes down a path that he never would have imagined possible, resulting in a global manhunt and a riveting trial.

Despite their Israeli citizenship, Hana and Daud cannot safely return to their homeland because a dangerous terrorist ring is threatening Daud. Hana is perfectly fine remaining in the United States, working for a law firm in Atlanta, especially when she learns she’s pregnant. But Daud can’t shake the draw to return home to Israel, even if it makes him a walking target. Hana is helping her boss plan a huge Middle East summit in Atlanta when Jakob Brodsky, her old friend and former co-litigator, asks for her help with a case.

On a hot summer night in 1980, two-year-old Audrey Culter was snatched from her bedroom and never seen again. Twenty-six years later, her brother, Sammy, fatefully crosses paths with the man the police failed to convict for her abduction and murder. A few weeks later, that man is dead, murdered. Private attorney Jason Kolarich is engaged to defend Audrey's brother. But can he trust the people who hired him?

Law professor Thomas Jackson McMurtrie literally wrote the book on evidence in the state of Alabama. But when a power-hungry colleague uses a recent run-in between McMurtrie and headstrong student Rick Drake to end his career, he is left unsure what to do next.

Two years ago, Darren Street made a name for himself as the man who rooted out corruption in the district attorney's office. Now the hotheaded young lawyer is in the public eye yet again - this time, accused of murder. Jalen Jordan retained Street for what seemed to be a minor traffic violation, but when evidence turned up linking Jordan to the death of two boys, Street wanted out of the case.

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.

New York, 1888. Gas lamps still flicker in the city streets, but the miracle of electric light is in its infancy. The person who controls the means to turn night into day will make history - and a vast fortune. A young untested lawyer named Paul Cravath, fresh out of Columbia Law School, takes a case that seems impossible to win. Paul's client, George Westinghouse, has been sued by Thomas Edison over a billion-dollar question: Who invented the lightbulb and holds the right to power the country?

Dawn. The English Channel. A small boat arrives crammed with exhausted migrants, not all of whom will make land. Some of the shattered occupants have already paid for their journeys. Others have arrived with a debt still to be paid. One of the migrants isn't fleeing anything. He's not from Europe, or Africa, or the East. He's from Texas, and he's wearing a robe. When the traffickers take some of their passengers to pay for their journey, they also take the man in the robe. That was their first mistake.

The place: central Florida. The situation: a sensational murder trial, set in a courthouse more Soviet than Le Corbusier; a rich, white teenage girl - a twin - on trial for murdering her toddler brother. Two of the jurors: Hannah, a married 52-year-old former Rolling Stone and Interview Magazine photographer of rock stars and socialites, and Graham, a 41-year-old anatomy professor. Both are sequestered along with the other jurors at the Econo Lodge off I-75. Hannah and Graham fall into a furtive affair, keeping their oath as jurors never to discuss the trial.

Ten-year-old Patrick O'Brien is a natural target at school. Shy, dyslexic, and small for his age, he tries to hide his first-grade reading level from everyone: from his classmates, from the grandfather who cares for him, and from the teachers who are supposed to help him. But the real trouble begins when Patrick is accused of attacking a school aide. The aide promptly quits and sues the boy, his family, and the school district. Patrick's grandfather turns to the law firm of Rosato & DiNunzio for help, and Mary DiNunzio is on the case.

After scheming his way to power in House of Cards, Francis Urquhart made a triumphant return in To Play the King - a Sunday Times number one best-seller that became a BBC TV series, with Ian Richardson resuming his award-winning role as Francis Urquhart, and a hugely successful Netflix series.

A dense, bitterly cold fog has settled over the Wye Valley when Bristol coroner Jenny Cooper is called to the scene of a dreadful tragedy: in the village of Blackstone Ley, a house has burned to the ground, with three members of a family inside. Though evidence of foul play is quickly uncovered, it isn't long before the police investigation is drawn to a close. It seems certain that the fire was started by one of the victims, Ed Morgan, in a fit of jealous rage. But their infant son is still missing, and Ed had left a message for his surviving wife....