Legal Thriller Crime Fiction

A woman stumbles onto a dark road in rural Oregon - tortured, battered, and bound. She tells a horrific story about being kidnapped, then tortured, until she finally managed to escape. She was the lucky one - two other women, with similar burns and bruises, were found dead. The surviving victim identifies the house where she was held captive, and the owner, Alex Mason - a prominent local attorney - is arrested.

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."

Can too big to fail get away with murder? Read the compelling legal novel by the best-selling author of An Involuntary Spy. Brent Marks had paid his dues as a lawyer, having taken his share of divorces and drunk driving cases over his 20 year career, but had finally reached a place in his life where he could take on cases of social importance. What he least expected was for April Marsh's predatory lending case against the big banks for wrongful foreclosure on her parent's home to turn into a murder investigation.

Identical, based loosely on the myth of Castor and Pollux, is the story of identical twins, Paul and Cass Giannis, and the complex relationships between their family and their former neighbors, the Kronons. The audiobook focuses principally on events in 2008, when Paul is a candidate for Mayor of Kindle County, and Cass is released from the penitentiary, 25 years after pleading guilty to the murder of his girlfriend, Athena Kronon.

Teen pop star Brittany Crutcher is found dead in small-town Tennessee. For attorney Bocephus Haynes, it’s just another night in Pulaski. Bo swore off criminal work after his last case, but the beloved singer’s murder demands answers. The prime suspect is local high school football hero and the victim’s boyfriend, Odell Champagne. However, this fallen athlete is one of Bo’s son’s best friends. Bo knows this young man and does not believe him capable of the crime. When Odell is charged with murder, Bo reluctantly takes the case, sparking outrage throughout the town.

Cold-blooded killer JimBone Wheeler blames Tom McMurtrie for putting him on death row. He once vowed that he’d bring “a reckoning” on Tom and everyone the southern lawyer holds dear. When Wheeler escapes from prison, he aims to fulfill his promise. Victim by victim, he’s getting closer to his ultimate target. But for Tom, who’s dying of cancer, the role of savior and protector is a struggle that is becoming more desperate by the hour.

Lawyer Arthur Beauchamp is facing the most explosive trial of his career: the defence of seven boisterous environmentalists accused of sabotaging an Ontario plant that pumps out a pesticide that has led to the mass death of honeybees. The story zigzags between Toronto, where the trial takes place, and Arthur’s West Coast island home, where he finds himself arrested for fighting his own environmental cause: the threatened destruction of a popular park. The Toronto trial concludes with a tense, hang-by-the-fingernails jury verdict.

It’s time to take your place on the jury. The victim: A 16-year-old girl with facial deformities, neglected by an alcoholic mother, who accuses the boys of something unthinkable. The defendants: Four handsome teenage boys from hardworking immigrant families. All with corroborating stories. Whose side would you take?

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.

In the seventh installment of Scott Pratt's best-selling Joe Dillard series, Dillard is hired to travel to Tennessee's capital city to defend Paul Milius, a record company baron accused of strangling Kasey Cartwright, his label's young star. Dillard navigates Nashville's unfamiliar legal system and the world of country music in search of the truth, but he soon finds himself confronted with a web of lies so masterfully woven that he fears he may never find any answers.

Perched on the soft tar of a New York City rooftop, a mysterious sniper fires a single round from a .50 caliber rifle. Five stories below, his target collapses on the marble steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dead. Crime reporter Jane Cole needs this story badly. Suspended NYPD cop Robert Warren is desperate to clear his name. They don't trust each other, but they make the perfect team. And as Cole and Warren track the killer, they uncover a plot so ruthless it shocks the conscience, a crime so expansive it will rock the world.

Winner of six Lambda Literary awards, the Henry Rios mystery series is iconic and Michael Nava has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of our best” writers. Here, Rios delves deeply into his Latino identity as he defends a young man charged with assassinating a prominent Los Angeles Latino politician. The San Francisco Chronicle hailed the novel and its author: “A beautifully conceived but gritty novel.... Nava writes the kind of small, clean, powerful novels that build in emotional power almost invisibly, leaving us breathless at the end.”

Thaddeus Murfee is back in this twisted tale of two trials, mother and daughter, each claiming to have shot father...He couldn't keep his hands off his stepdaughter. The question becomes, who shot him? The mother or the stepdaughter? Of all his cases, this one is Thaddeus' most memorable and most difficult. Enjoy a front row seat as the courtroom whiz takes on the establishment only to find his entire world turned upside down. It's back and forth, cat-and-mouse until the unthinkable happens.

A Turkish diplomat in New York City is gunned down in broad daylight, and all signs point to an ancient blood feud. The suspected gunman is Armenian. His alleged motive is to avenge the slaughter of Armenians by Turks generations before. But prosecutor Butch Karp has never accepted the easy answer, and he soon realizes the facts of this murder are more complicated than they seem. To close the case, Karp and his investigator wife, Marlene, must infiltrate a cross-section of New York society, while fending off crooks and madmen from every corner of the Big Apple and the world beyond.

Earl Thomas, a straight-laced taxman with his fair share of police encounters, is the begrudging foreperson in a high-stakes trial in Miami. Laura Hurtado-Perez is a physician whose unassuming manner conceals a private pain. Joseph Cole is the founder of his local neighborhood watch, unduly obsessed with the families around him.

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.

Former defense attorney Darren Street is desperately trying to put his life back together after spending two years in a maximum-security prison for a murder he didn’t commit. He’s rebuilding his law practice, reconnecting with his son, and falling more deeply in love with his girlfriend, fellow attorney Grace Alexander. But the past casts a long shadow, and for Street, there’s no outrunning it.

In the sixth volume of the best-selling Joe Dillard series, Dillard does something he has never done before - he hires a young associate. Her name is Charleston Story, she is bright and beautiful, and in her very first case, she winds up inheriting an item so valuable that it threatens to destroy her and everything she cares about. As Dillard tries to help and advise his young protégé, he finds himself dragged into a web of danger and intrigue, a web so thick that he may never be able to extract himself.

Harper must deal with a dark part of her past when she defends her rapist, Michael Reynolds, who is charged with murdering a judge. Harper wants revenge, so she takes the case with the explicit desire to throw it. But as she digs deeper into the case, she understands that if she throws Michael's case, it means that the real culprit will go free. Struggling with her conscience, which is fighting for her desire for vengeance, Harper must access some of the darkest recesses of her brain.

Butch Karp's career prosecuting New York's worst criminals takes a chilling turn when a series of ghastly child murders opens a window into the city’s hellish underworld. Karp and love-interest Marlene Ciampi pursue a psychopath known to his young victims as the Bogeyman, but what they find is more threatening than a lone predator. To stop the evil they unearth will take more than just courage in the courtroom; the two will need to follow a sinister trail into New York City's darkest corners, where the law is powerless to protect them.