Legal Mystery Suspense

Retired lawyer Andy Carpenter has run the Tara Foundation—the dog rescue organization named after his beloved golden retriever—for years. It's always been his calling, even as Andy's pulled into representing clients in court. His investigator, Marcus Clark, has been at Andy's side for a long time. Even though they've known each other for years, Marcus keeps his personal life a mystery. So it’s a shock when Marcus arrives at the Tara Foundation with two strangers in tow.

Meet Assistant District Attorney Lettie Portman, a sex-crimes prosecutor whose past demands justice. When a 14-year-old girl is savagely attacked by her mother's live-in boyfriend, Lettie is called to the hospital. There, she meets a sweet young girl whose only goal is to go to school and come home to a safe environment. But mom's boyfriend makes the girl's world anything but safe. Soon, the abuse gets worse, and Lettie, the prosecutor, goes to the grand jury with the case. Two juries later, the abuser is still loose on the streets.

The murder of a woman from one of the town's oldest families has Rosedale's upper crust howling for blood, and the prosecutor is counting on Ruby's inexperience to help him deliver a swift conviction. Ruby's client is a college football star who has returned home after a career-ending injury, and she is determined to build a defense that will stick. She finds help in unexpected quarters from Suzanne, a hard-charging attorney armed to the teeth, and Shorty, a diner cook who knows more than he lets on.

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.

A young woman is haunted by two murders that are closely linked -- despite the 110 years that separate them.

Following the breakup of her marriage and her pursuit by an obsessed stalker, criminal defense attorney Emily Graham accepts an offer to work in a major Manhattan law firm. Feeling a need for roots, she buys her ancestral home in New Jersey, which her family sold in 1892, after the disappearance of young Madeline Shapley, one of Emily's forebears.

Supreme Court clerk Avery Keene is back, trying to get her feet on solid ground after unraveling an international conspiracy in While Justice Sleeps. But as the sparks of Congressional hearings and political skirmishes swirl around her, Avery is approached at a legal conference by Preston Davies, an unassuming young man and fellow law clerk to a federal judge in Idaho.

A young woman accuses a prominent local college athlete of rape. Convicted with the help of indisputable DNA evidence, the athlete swears his innocence and threatens both his lawyer and his accuser as he's sent to prison. Not long after, there's another rape, and the DNA test shows that the same person committed both rapes - which is seemingly impossible since the man convicted of the first rape was in prison at the time of the second one. Now, the convicted athlete, joined by a new lawyer, is granted a new trial and bail.

FBI Agents Kim Otto and Carlos Gaspar track Reacher's past in Tampa where they team up with Judge Willa Carson, investigative journalist Jessica Kimball, and attorney Jennifer Lane. When Retired Army Colonel Thomas Weston returns to MacDill Air Force Base for a public event after 16 years, he's an easy target for his enemies, including Jack Reacher.

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.

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.

Joe Fielding wasn't an ordinary investigator. He wasn't clean, he wasn't honorable, and he wasn't truthful—he was one of the most corrupt, ruthless, and fraudulent investigators to ever walk the streets of Chicago. Fielding's employment at a family law firm was littered with criminal activity, and his employers were determined to see his secrets go to the grave with him.

Bennie Rosato, Mary DiNunzio, Judy Carrier, and Anne Murphy are back with all cylinders firing in Accused. Mary Dinuzio has just been promoted to partner and is about to take on her most unusual case yet, brought to the firm by a thirteen-year-old genius with a penchant for beekeeping. Allegra Gardner's sister Fiona was murdered six years ago, and it seemed like an open-and-shut case: the accused, Lonnie Stall, was seen fleeing the scene; his blood was on Fiona and her blood was on him; most damningly, Lonnie Stall pleaded guilty.

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.

Coroner Jenny Cooper investigates…. An unlikely suicide or a deadly conspiracy? When Bristol Coroner Jenny Cooper investigates the fatal plunge of a man from a motorway bridge, she little suspects that it has any connection with the sudden death of a friend’s thirteen year old daughter from a deadly strain of meningitis. But as Jenny pieces together the dead man’s last days, she’s drawn into a mystery whose dark ripples stretch across continents and back through decades.

FBI Special Agent Kim Otto’s search for Reacher takes a deadly turn when she’s forced to handle the fallout from Lee Child’s The Midnight Line - and gets caught in the crossfire. Reacher set out to do a good deed for an Army officer in The Midnight Line. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Now, five people are missing, and one is dead. But when Reacher’s enemies hunt his friends, someone has to pay. An exciting chase from Detroit to Chicago to Houston and deep into Mexico where FBI Special Agent Kim Otto fights to the death in the gripping conclusion.

The governor of North Carolina has appointed Deborah to a judicial seat in the District Court Division. On her weekends, the fledgling judge has been helping an all-woman building crew complete a home for a needy single mother. Her attempts to gain positive P.R. go awry when her niece is found battered and half-naked in the partially completed home, with Deborah's own bloody hammer lying nearby.

When a horrifying attack leaves one of the four members of the Women's Murder Club struggling for her life, the others fight to keep a madman behind bars before anyone else is hurt. And Lindsay Boxer and her new partner in the San Francisco police department run flat-out to stop a series of kidnappings that has electrified the city: children are being plucked off the streets together with their nannies - but the kidnappers aren't demanding ransom.

When junior barrister Daniel Pitt is summoned to the scene of a murder in the slum area known as Mile End, he knows only that the victim is a senior barrister from his firm. To Daniel's relief, it is not his close friend Toby Kitteridge, but the question remains: What was this respected colleague doing in Mile End? The firm's head, Marcus fford Croft, may know more than he admits, but fford Croft's memory is not what it used to be. And so Daniel and Kitteridge must investigate on their own, lest the police uncover something they should not.

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?

Night club owner Rick Cowan approaches criminal defense attorney Tex Hunter and presents an offer Hunter can't refuse. But Rick Cowan isn't a regular client. He isn't faultless, he isn't friendly, and he isn't clean—his past is littered with violence, agony, and decades of fraudulent behavior. Cowan claims he's innocent of the felony drug charges and has been set up from the inside, but the evidence against him continues to mount.