Legal Suspense Thrillers

To Darby Shaw it was no more than a legal shot in the dark, a brilliant guess. To the Washington establishment it was political dynamite. Suddenly Darby is witness to a murder—a murder intended for her. Going underground, she finds there is only one person she can trust—an ambitious reporter after a newsbreak hotter than Watergate—to help her piece together the deadly puzzle. Somewhere between the bayous of Louisiana and the White House's inner sanctums, a violent cover-up is being engineered. For someone has read Darby's brief.

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.

While settling into her new home in Los Angeles together with her boyfriend and TV star Patrick McNabb, attorney Sandy Moss receives a phone call from the LA Men's Detention Center. It's a new client accused of murder: the near-stoic Lt. K. C. Trench! Being good at his job but not well-liked in his department, Trench is accused of killing a fellow LA police officer whom he openly despised and threatened. With the odds against her, Sandy takes on the case of her sometime nemesis/sometime ally. She is certain that Trench can't be the killer.

Mary DiNunzio has been slaving away for the past eight years trying to make partner in her cutthroat Philadelphia law firm. She's too busy to worry about the crank phone calls she's been getting - until they fall into a sinister pattern. The phone rings as soon as she gets to work, then as soon as she gets home. Mary can't shake the sensation that someone is watching her, following her every move. The shadowboxing turns deadly when her worst fears are realized, and she has to fight for something a lot more important than partnership: her life.

Though some think they saw a ghost, it was a real, live woman in the (mostly exposed) flesh flitting through Sierra Vista Park. Eleanor Corbin has a taste for trouble - and a talent for getting out of it using the most outrageous means to cover her tracks. Now her scandalized half-sister, Olga, fears Eleanor may be using lascivious antics to camouflage more larcenous acts.

You can pick your friends, they say, but you can't pick your family. And lately, Mike Daley's family has been keeping him very busy. An ex-priest, ex-public defender, and ex-corporate lawyer, Daley and his former wife, Rosie Fernandez, now run their own San Francisco criminal defense firm. Most of their cases are fairly small-time, which is why it would be surprising that the person accused of murdering movie director Richard (Big Dick) MacArthur is calling them - except that the accused is Rosie's own niece, Angelina.

Darren Street faces the most personal and ruthless vendetta of his life. After forfeiting years serving time for a false murder conviction, former criminal defense attorney Darren Street finally got his freedom back and is trying to build a regular life. But when an unthinkable tragedy shatters his hard-earned normalcy, Street is left reeling from the devastating blow.

A referendum on Scottish independence is only days away, and the campaign has been expertly orchestrated by First Minister Susan Ward. All signs point to victory for the nationalists. But when senior civil servant John Millar is shot in a Glasgow alley on a furiously rain-soaked night, his death triggers a chain of catastrophic events. An incriminating phone number and video are found in his possession.

A suspected terrorist is tortured to death in a secret Afghanistan prison. A low ranking guard is the military’s top suspect. Army JAG lawyer Captain Max O’Donnell isn’t so sure. Max is 90 days away from ending his tour of duty, and the last thing he needs is to take on an un-winnable case. But no matter how jaded and burned out he has become, he still believes justice is worth fighting for. Digging deeper into the case, Max unearths a shadowy alliance between the prosecution, led by Colonel Covington Paine, and a team of faceless CIA spooks.

Erin McCabe has been referred the biggest case of her career. Four months ago, William E. Townsend, Jr., son of a New Jersey state senator, was found fatally stabbed in a rundown motel near Atlantic City. Sharise Barnes, a 19-year-old transgender prostitute, is in custody, and given the evidence against her, there seems little doubt of a guilty verdict. Erin knows that defending Sharise will blow her own private life wide open, and doubtless deepen her estrangement from her family. Yet as a trans woman, she feels uniquely qualified to help Sharise.

In the heat of the city, a man is out of time: speeding in a beat-up Ford Tempo, blasting easy-listening music. Reporter Steve Everett drinks too much, makes love to his boss' wife, and has just stumbled upon a shocking truth: A convicted killer is about to be executed for a crime he didn't commit. In the cold confines of Death Row, Frank Beachum is also out of time. Ready to say good-bye to the wife and child he loves and hello to the God he still believes in, Beachum knows he did not kill a convenience store clerk six years ago.

Suzy and her daughter are on a bus, heading for London and safety. She knows her partner will be hunting them down. It's what he does for a living. He hunts people. Suzy's plans go awry when armed robbers storm the bus on an isolated road and rob the passengers. She loses her entire savings—money she desperately needs to build a new life for herself and her daughter, far away from her psychotic partner. With the sound of approaching sirens in the distance, Suzy makes a split-second decision.

The McCarrans and the Gallaghers, two military families, have been close for decades, ever since Anthony McCarran—now one of the army's most distinguished generals—became best friends with Jack Gallagher, a fellow West Pointer who was later killed in Vietnam. Now a new generation of soldiers faces combat, and Lt. Brian McCarran, the general's son, has returned from a harrowing tour in Iraq. Traumatized by wartime experiences he will not reveal, Brian depends on his lifelong friendship with Kate Gallagher, Jack's daughter, who is married to Brian's commanding officer in Iraq.

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?

Thaddeus has everything to lose and the weight of the legal world on his shoulders. A lawyer of four years who has earned his spurs, Murfee finds himself defending three felony crimes - including his own. His new wife has given him a daughter, and he dotes on her. Then the mob comes.

It's midsummer in Sweden, when the light lingers through dawn as winter finally ends. In this magical time, a brutal killer strikes, and the murder of a female priest sends shock waves through the community. Though she has no cause to get involved, attorney Rebecka Martinsson cannot help herself. And the further she is drawn into a mystery that will soon claim another victim, the more the dead woman's world consumes her - a world of hurt and healing, sin and sexuality, and above all, of lethal sacrifice.

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.

When three men announce that they are suing the Rosato & DiNunzio law firm for reverse sex discrimination—claiming that they were not hired because they were men—Mary DiNunzio and Bennie Rosato are outraged. To make matters worse, their one male employee, John Foxman, intends to resign, claiming that there is some truth to this case. The plaintiffs’ lawyer is Nick Machiavelli, who has already lost to Mary once and is now back with a vengeance —determined not to not only win, but destroy the firm. It soon becomes clear that Machiavelli will do anything in his power to achieve his end…even after the case turns deadly. The stakes have never been higher for Mary and her associates as they try to keep Machiavelli at bay, solve a murder, and save the law firm they love…or they could lose everything they’ve worked for.

When whip-smart criminal defense lawyer Joanna Chylka is tasked with defending the son of her law firm’s biggest client, she is stumped for the first time in her career. Her client, Piotr Langer Jr, is charged with murder, and he’s guilty. Assisted by the firm’s newest trainee, Kordian Orynski, Joanna finds a maze of tangled evidence. Piotr is alleged to have sat in his apartment for ten days with two corpses before calmly opening the door to the police as if nothing had happened. He has confessed to the murders, but the truth is far more complex and shocking than they could have imagined.

Faced with evidence of stunning prosecutorial misconduct, a San Francisco judge has ordered a new trial for the Maxwell brothers' father, Lawrence, who was convicted of killing their mother 21 years before. A prison snitch soon turns up dead, with Lawrence the only suspect, and Leo teams up with hotshot attorney Nina Schuyler to defend Lawrence against murder charges both old and new.