Legal Thriller Crime Fiction

Keera Duggan was building a solid reputation as a Seattle prosecutor, until her romantic relationship with a senior colleague ended badly. For the competitive former chess prodigy, returning to her family’s failing criminal defense law firm to work for her father is the best shot she has. With the right moves, she hopes to restore the family’s reputation, her relationship with her father, and her career.

When a years-long case against a powerful mobster finally cracks and an unimpeachable witness takes the stand, federal prosecutor Nora Carleton is looking forward to putting the defendant away for good. The mobster, though, has other plans. As the witness's testimony concludes, a note is passed to the prosecution offering up information into the assassination of a disgraced former New York governor, murdered in his penthouse apartment just days before. It's enough to blow the case wide open, and to send Nora into a high-stakes investigation of conspiracy, corruption, and danger.

For years, major New York law firm Harland & Sinton has operated a massive global fraud. The FBI are on to them, but they need witnesses to secure their case. When a major client of the firm, David Child, is arrested for murder, the FBI ask con artist turned lawyer Eddie Flynn to secure Child as his client and force him to testify against the firm. Eddie's not a man to be forced into representing a guilty client, but the FBI have incriminating files on Eddie's wife, Christine, and if Eddie won't play ball, she'll pay the price.

"I'm not on trial. San Francisco is". An accused murderer called Kingfisher is about to go on trial for his life. Or is he? By unleashing unexpected violence on the lawyers, jurors, and police involved in the case, he has paralyzed the city. Detective Lindsay Boxer and the Women's Murder Club are caught in the eye of the storm. Now comes a courtroom shocker you will never see coming.

Criminal defense attorney Tex Hunter has a target on his back. Defending an accused killer is never easy, but when a homeless teenager is charged with the murder of a retired Chicago Police Detective, the pressure builds to breaking point. Sidney McCann was no ordinary cop. He wasn't a captain, he wasn't a beat cop, and he wasn't an average desk jockey—he was one of the most corrupt, twisted, and ruthless cops the Chicago Police Department had ever produced. But that history, that long line of accusations, didn't matter to the current crop of police officers.

In 1993, Marie Gesto disappeared after walking out of a supermarket. Harry Bosch worked the case but couldn't crack it, and the 22-year-old was never found. Now, more than a decade later, with the Gesto file still on his desk, Bosch gets a call from the district attorney. A man accused of two heinous murders is willing to come clean about several others, including the killing of Marie Gesto.

Homicide detective Tracy Crosswhite has returned to the police force after the sensational retrial of her sister’s killer. Still scarred from that ordeal, Tracy is pulled into an investigation that threatens to end her career, if not her life. A serial killer known as the Cowboy is killing young women in cheap motels in North Seattle.

Sam Johnstone was hoping for renewal when he took a job at a boutique law firm in rustic Wyoming. The mountains and streams of the West would be a refreshing, quiet place to start over after years of war and turmoil in his personal life. But after a local woman is brutally murdered, Sam realizes that things aren’t so quiet in this rural American town. The accused is one Tommy Olsen, a known delinquent who had been sleeping with the victim. Sam is repulsed by the crime and wants nothing to do with the case but meets with Tommy to make sure he has legal representation.

In 1966 in Pulaski, Tennessee, Bocephus Haynes watched in horror as his father was brutally murdered by 10 local members of the Ku Klux Klan. As an African American lawyer practicing in the birthplace of the Klan years later, Bo has spent his life pursuing justice in his father's name. But when Andy Walton, the man believed to have led the lynch mob 45 years earlier, ends up murdered in the same spot as Bo's father, Bo becomes the prime suspect.

The sequel to the genre-defining, landmark best seller Presumed Innocent, Innocent continues the story of Rusty Sabich and Tommy Molto who are, once again, 20 years later, pitted against each other in a riveting psychological match after the mysterious death of Rusty's wife.

Alex Cross has never been on the wrong side of the law - until now. Charged with gunning down followers of his nemesis Gary Soneji in cold blood, Cross is being turned into the poster child for trigger-happy cops who think they're above the law. Cross knows it was self-defense. But will a jury see it that way? As Cross fights for his professional life and his freedom, his former partner, John Sampson, brings him a gruesome, titillating video tied to the mysterious disappearances of several young girls.

When she was twelve years old, Kirra Mandarian’s parents were murdered and she barely escaped with her life. Fourteen years later Kirra is a commonwealth attorney back home in Porte Franklin, Virginia, and her goal is to find out who killed her parents and why. She assumes the identity of E.N.—Eliot Ness—and gathers proof to bring down the man she believes was behind her parents’ deaths. She quickly learns that big-time criminals are very dangerous indeed and realizes she needs Dillon Savich’s help.

Brady Coyne never meant to become the private lawyer to New England's upper crust, but after more than a decade working for Florence Gresham and her friends, he has developed a reputation for discretion that the rich cannot resist. He is fond of Mrs. Gresham - unflappable, uncouth, and never tardy with a check - and he has seen her through her husband's suicide and her first son's death in Vietnam. But he has never seen her crack until the day her second son, George, leaps into the sea at jagged Charity's Point.

Arriving in Little Havana in Miami, Cole creates a list of potential victims while Warren tracks down an old confidential informant. Desperate to reach a reclusive financier, Cole then makes an unusual friend, who leads her on a wild-goose chase through Miami. All the while, news is breaking around the world that implicates Cole and Warren in the killings, and a mysterious pair has followed them to Miami.

They call themselves the Brethren: three disgraced former judges doing time in a Florida federal prison. One was sent up for tax evasion. Another, for skimming bingo profits. And the third, for a career-ending drunken joyride. Meeting daily in the prison law library, taking exercise walks in their boxer shorts, these judges-turned-felons can reminisce about old court cases, dispense a little jailhouse justice, and contemplate where their lives went wrong.

Fourteen years ago, prosecutor Jessica Yardley's husband went to prison for a series of brutal murders. She's finally created a life with her daughter and is a well-respected attorney. She's moving on. But when a new rash of homicides has her ex-husband, Eddie, written all over them - the nightmares of her past come back to life.

Hours after rejecting the Corrowa People’s native title claim on Brisbane’s Meston Park, Justice Bruce Brosnan is brutally murdered in his home. Days later, lawyers against the claim are also found dead. Aboriginal people were once prohibited from entering Brisbane’s city limits at night, and Meston Park stood on the boundary. The Corrowa’s matriarch, Ethel Cobb, is convinced the murders are the work of an ancient assassin who has returned to destroy the boundary, but Aboriginal lawyer Miranda Eversely isn't so sure.

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.

There’s nothing Jilly Truitt likes more than winning a case, especially against her former mentor, prosecutor Cy Kenge. Jilly has baggage, the residue of a dark time in a series of foster homes, but that’s in the past. Now she’s building her own criminal defense firm and making a name for herself as a tough-as-nails lawyer willing to take risks in the courtroom. When the affluent and enigmatic Vincent Trussardi is accused of his wife Laura’s murder, Jilly agrees to defend him, despite predictions that the case is a sure loser and warnings from those close to her to stay away from the Trussardi family.

Set in the era of the Nixon and Reagan presidencies, this novel examines the American conscience while inviting us into the glittering world of the East Coast legal community. Stephen L. Carter's book follows black Ivy League law professor Talcott Garland as he investigates the death of his father, Judge Oliver Garland, the eponymous "Emperor."