Legal Thriller Crime Fiction

Cooper Dixon should have it made, with a beautiful wife, Kelly, two great kids, and a thriving business, the Tower Agency. But for Cooper, things aren’t turning out how he expected. He and Kelly are caught in a never-ending cycle of arguments - Cooper can’t remember the last time they had sex. And Cooper’s troubled business partner, Gates Ballenger, is scheming to sell the Tower Agency out from under him. When a gang of criminals is hired by a mysterious client to kidnap Kelly and set up Cooper to take the fall, Cooper’s life goes completely off the rails.

In a life of crime, loyalty means everything - even if you don’t always see eye to eye. But when Vaughn Sadler speaks up to get Franny Doyle sent down, he’s broken every rule in the book to win checkmate. Holed up in prison, Franny has more than one score to settle - but she’s starting with Vaughn. Because you don’t grass on your own, no matter what. And though she may be behind bars, she will get revenge - whatever the cost.

Corporate lawyer Elizabeth Carlyle is under a lot of pressure. Her prestigious New York law firm is working on the most high-stakes case in company history defending a prominent bank. When Elizabeth gets the news that one of her junior associates has lost his phone - and the secret documents that were on it - she needs help. Badly. Enter ex-CIA officer Valencia Walker, a high-priced fixer who gets called in when governments, corporations, and plutocrats need their problems solved discretely. But things get complicated when the missing phone is retrieved....

Two murders. Two trials. And two kids who were not exactly guilty. The odd part is that the defendant in the first case is the lawyer in the second, which occurs in the same courtroom against the same prosecutor 15 years later. When young defense attorney David Stillman takes an alcohol-fueled hiatus from his law practice, he meets Michaela, an exotic older woman who gradually pulls the story of David's haunted and past out of him as a romance develops. The relation by David of the childhood saga of he and his violent group of teenage friends proves cathartic.

When it comes to establishing reasonable doubt in the minds of a New York jury, defense attorney Michael Roehmer is the best in the business - and no one knows this better than rape victim Lisa Altman. She sat helplessly in the courtroom as Roehmer, smoothly and without mercy, shot gaping holes in her testimony. As a result, the man who brutally assaulted her walked free. Right and wrong, guilt and innocence, mean nothing to Roehmer. For him, winning is everything. Now Altman is sitting at a different table: Her rapist has been savagely murdered and she’s accused of the heinous crime.

From Linda Fairstein, author of Cold Hit, comes this newest Alexandra Cooper mystery, a richly nuanced synthesis of history and suspense. Fairstein's real-life experience as head of the New York district attorney's Sex Crime Unit gives her fiction an eerie ring of truth.

A simple domestic abuse case turns deadly when the alleged abuser is killed and Stephanie Ann "Sam" McRae's client disappears. When a friend asks Sam to find Melanie Hayes, the Maryland attorney is drawn into a complex case of murder and identity theft that has her running from the mob, breaking into a strip club and forming a shaky alliance with an offbeat private investigator to discover the truth about Melanie and her ex-boyfriend.

J.D. Scrbacek has just won the biggest trial of his career, but even as he crows to the press, his entire life blows sky-high. Was the bomb meant for him, or for his mobster client? In this seaside casino town where the tables run hot and the tensions run high, the odds say the attorney is a marked man. Alone and on the run, Scrbacek flees into the city's forgotten underbelly, a ruined corridor called Crapstown, where he is forced to confront the ghosts of his past, his present, and his future.

A serial killer the likes of whom hasn't been seen in centuries. A pretender who has outdone the master. Fifty planets. The dead are screaming for vengeance and only Rivka and her team can hear their cries. The Singularity. The Magistrate and her crew. How many more must die before the killer can be brought to justice? The battle of wits has begun, and only one can survive. Win or die trying. Rivka has to dig deeper than ever before into her investigative skills to figure out who's next and how to stop the one masquerading as . . . Jack the Ripper.

Andy Gibbons had been sentenced to life in prison for a crime he didn't commit. After 10 years inside, he had abandoned all hope, and resigned himself to the fact that he would remain there for the rest of his life. Judgment Call is a full-length audiobook, a crime suspense-thriller about a corrupt organization with a sinister agenda that exploits every weakness and every dark corner of the fallible justice system. This fast-paced suspense-thriller is the first audiobook in J C Ryan's Exonerated Series.

When the daughter of prominent civil litigator Graham Hutchins is found with her throat slashed, the woman's spurned ex-boyfriend seems the likely suspect. But only days later, the young man dies in what appears to be a suicide. Or was it? Now authorities are faced with a possible new crime. And their person of interest is Hutchins. After all, avenging the death of his daughter is the perfect reason to kill. If he's as innocent as he claims, only one lawyer has what it takes to prove it: his friend and colleague Samantha Brinkman.

In rural McCown County, Missouri, a young pregnant woman is found beaten to death in a trailer park. The only witness to the murder is Ivy, her six-year-old daughter, who points to her mom's boyfriend - father of the unborn child. County prosecutor Madeleine Thompson promises the community justice, and in the Ozarks that can mean only one thing: a death sentence. When Madeleine's first choice for cocounsel declines to try a death penalty case, she is forced to turn to assistant prosecutor Elsie Arnold.

While Anna is enjoying a romantic dinner capped off by a marriage proposal, a few miles away two separate groups are gearing up to raid a brothel. A vicious killer known as Diablo - the Devil - leads one group. A few minutes later, Anna’s own investigative team heads in to search the brothel, as part of the fight against human trafficking in D.C. Both groups are caught off guard, with deadly results.

Daniel Youngblood is a world-weary oil and gas investment banker who’s ready to hit the beach, when he’s hired by a Saudi Prince for an OPEC deal where he can net himself $25 million as a swan song. At the same time, he meets and falls in love with Lydia, an exotic European fashion photographer, who he later discovers is really a CIA trained spy with a shocking history with the Saudi Prince. She convinces Daniel to enlist in what becomes a race for the lovers to stop a Muslim terrorist internet plot to bring down the Saudi royal family and cripple the world’s oil capacity, all before they wind up dead.

Assistant District Attorney Butch Karp is finally recognized for his heroic service to New York City when a group of politicians back him for the top job as Manhattan's district attorney. But a series of cases involving vigilante murders begins to reveal the true motives of those civil servants standing by his side. It's Karp versus the dirty city in one of Tanenbaum's most revealing and caustic legal thrillers - a stunning indictment of civil corruption and overreach.

Johnny Rames awakens in a field on the outskirts of a music festival in Maine, covered in someone else's blood and unable to remember the events of the night before. As his lawyer, Len Gibson, strives to defend him against the charge of murder, Johnny discovers not only the truth of what happened that night but also the shocking secrets of his family history. Blue Lobster is an interwoven tale of three generations.

Newly single after calling off her wedding, sex-crimes prosecutor Anna Curtis is summoned home to Michigan when her old high school coach - a hometown hero - is killed in a fiery car crash. But Anna isn't there to prosecute a crime; she's home to support her innocent sister, Jody, who has been wrongfully accused of the coach's murder.

After a life in various war zones, Dell and Dolly have settled in this town, fulfilling Dolly's lifelong dream. Though she has given up her nursing career and moved smoothly into civilian life, Dell had been a mercenary, so they both have to sacrifice their prior identities. When the star of the girls' softball team shoots and kills the most popular boy in school, Dolly asks Dell to uncover the motive behind this inexplicable crime. It doesn't take him long to uncover a horrifying rite of passage.

James Drinker is a bit of an oddball. A funny-looking, geeky loner, he walks into Jason Kolarich’s office one day with a preemptive concern: two women have recently been murdered, seemingly by the same killer, and Drinker thinks he will be the police’s main suspect. One woman was his ex-girlfriend, he says, and the other was a friend. He’s the only link between the victims and he has no alibi for the night of either murder - surely the police will realize it soon. Believing he’s the target of a frame-up, Drinker hires Kolarich for his defense. Something about James Drinker seems off from the start, but Kolarich doesn’t give it too much thought. Until another murder occurs....

Poppy Rice is home in her D.C. apartment with very little furniture and a stack of boxes she still hasn't unpacked after five years. It's three AM and she's suffering from her usual insomnia, so she watches a tape of the CBS Evening News. Dan Rather is interviewing convicted ax-murderer Rona Leigh Glueck who, in 10 days, will be the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War. Poppy pauses the tape on a close-up of Rona Leigh's delicate, child-like hands. So maybe it was a lightweight ax?