Culture

Best Legal Thriller Books

Published

3 months ago

February 8, 2025

Since I’ve written four legal thrillers, you won’t be surprised to learn that I also love to read them. I use the term “legal thriller” in the broadest possible sense: courtroom dramas, stories focused on corruption in the legal profession, good old-fashioned legal whodunits. What really draws me in is a novel with a broader social context that lets me see the world from a perspective that’s different from my own. In my own novels, the main protagonist is Erin McCabe — a criminal defense attorney who, like me, also happens to be a transgender woman. I use Erin to introduce readers who may not know anyone who is trans to a character that humanizes the transgender experience and the issues we face.

With that in mind, here are some legal thrillers that I think will not only keep you turning pages late into the night, but also broaden your worldview.

By Harper Lee

Depending on one’s point of view, “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a revered or reviled novel. Although there are valid arguments that some elements of the story have not aged well, Lee’s Pulitzer-winning courtroom drama — about an attorney defending a Black man accused of sexually assaulting a white woman in 1930s Alabama — paints a vivid picture of the impact of racial discrimination, not only on the justice system but also on the everyday lives of people of color.

By Scott Turow

There are some aspects of this 1987 classic that even the author concedes are outdated, especially its treatment of the few female characters. That said, there is a reason it is often held up as the gold standard of modern legal thrillers, so I would encourage you to put your reservations aside — even if you’ve already watched the streaming series based on the novel — go back and read this book.

It’s not always easy turning mundane courtroom proceedings into high drama, but Turow, like others on this list, is a master. Rusty Sabich, the second-in-command at the Kindle County district attorney’s office, is charged with murdering a colleague with whom he had an affair. But Rusty is not the only one with secrets, and the resulting courtroom drama, backroom politics and examination of corruption in the justice system make for a compelling thriller. I remember reading it when it was first published and being absolutely gobsmacked by the reveal at the end. Age spots and all, it’s still one of the best.

By John Grisham

Originally published in 1989 to little fanfare, Grisham’s debut novel is a compelling story about a Black man who kills the white men who sexually assaulted his 10-year-old daughter, and the lawyer who defends him. Although it was Grisham’s later novels that made him a household name, this book is special — a true-to-life courtroom drama that deals with racism but also captures the moral and ethical ambiguities that many criminal defense lawyers wrestle with. Grisham pulls off a unique feat: You find yourself rooting for the murderer, and for the lawyer who knew what was going to happen.

By Allen Eskens

Eskens worked for years as a criminal defense attorney, so it’s not surprising that his novels reflect an insider’s knowledge of how the justice system works; for me, he’s every bit as good a legal thriller writer as Turow and Grisham. “The Stolen Hours” revolves around a recent law school graduate, Lila Nash, working her dream job in a prosecutor’s office while trying to deal with a vengeful, misogynistic boss. When she’s assigned to work on a sexual assault case, the investigation morphs from a single victim into an examination of a series of murders — suggesting a serial killer who, years earlier, may have targeted Lila herself. Eskens skillfully puts us inside the heads of Lila, the lead detective and the killer in a dangerous game of cat and mouse, leading to a conclusion I never saw coming.

By Angie Kim

Kim does a masterful job of using a classic courtroom drama to tell the story of an immigrant family and what parents will do to make a better life for their child. At the center of the story is a mother who has been charged with murder in the death of her young son, who was killed in a fire in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. The novel is told from the points of view of different characters, all of whom view the fire and the boy’s tragic death through their own lens — which makes trying to piece together what actually happened like looking through a kaleidoscope. The truth finally comes out, but there are no heroes in this story, only victims. This is a great thriller elevated by lessons about the immigrant experience, and the many shapes love takes.

By Kia Abdullah

Abdullah’s protagonist is Zara Kaleel, a Muslim woman and former barrister working as an adviser at a clinic for sexual assault victims in London. As Zara wrestles with personal issues, she takes on a case involving allegations of sexual assault made by a young white woman suffering from neurofibromatosis — a disfiguring disease — against four young, handsome Muslim men. The reader is confronted with the misogyny and disdain directed at the victim, who is considered “ugly,” as well as the Islamophobia and racism that the young men accused of the crime are forced to endure. Abdullah’s heartbreaking story, which alternates points of view, allows you to see the humanity of all the characters and the ways these events will impact them for the rest of their lives. A remarkable work of fiction that allows you to experience what it’s like to be the other.

By Wanda M. Morris

Not all legal thrillers take place in the courtroom: Morris’s layered novel focuses on corruption in the C-suite. Ellice Littlejohn, who grew up poor and Black in the South, is now a successful corporate lawyer trying to deal with her secret past — and with the murder of her boss, who happened to be white, married and her lover. There were times when I wanted to scream at Ellice, “What are you doing?!” But the reasons for how she acts (or doesn’t act) are slowly revealed and, when they are, it all makes painful, perfect sense. There are some books that will stay with you long after you’re done: This is one of them.

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Culture

New Crime Novels With Unexpected Twists

Published

2 hours ago

May 11, 2025

Press Room

By Jeffery Deaver

Colter Shaw is a professional “rewards seeker,” a skilled tracker who specializes in finding missing people — usually for the reward money, though sometimes out of the goodness of his heart. It’s a simple enough vocation and yet, as the suspense veteran Deaver has demonstrated in four prior Shaw novels (and the TV adaptation “Tracker”), the ways in which Shaw finds peril — or peril finds him — keep multiplying. In SOUTH OF NOWHERE (Putnam, 403 pp., $30), his sister Dorion implores him to help to locate potential survivors after a levee collapses in a small Northern California town.

From here, Deaver is off to the proverbial races. Does every chapter have a twist? Pretty much. Is Colter just likable enough to brush off needless conflict and still find time for romance? Definitely. Is the writing a little too reminiscent of detailed outlines like the ones Deaver is known to fashion before writing a first draft? You bet. Could I put the book down? Not a chance.

The Colter Shaw series prioritizes action and the constant possibility of calamity, leaving only the barest amount of room for character development, like Colter’s continued grappling with the effects of his survivalist upbringing. The books don’t measure up to the best of Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme novels, but they all accomplish their mission: thrilling engagement.

by Uzma Jalaluddin

Kausar Khan, introduced in DETECTIVE AUNTY (Harper Perennial, 326 pp., paperback, $17.99), has spent the past 20 years relishing the stability of placid North Bay, where she and her husband moved after fleeing busy, bustling Toronto in the wake of a family tragedy.

But then her husband dies shortly after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and her daughter, Sana, calls with upsetting news: “I’m in trouble. There’s been a murder, and I’m the prime suspect.” It seems Sana’s landlord has been found inside her clothing store with a dagger in his chest. Kausar returns to Toronto’s Golden Crescent neighborhood as both a concerned mother and a tenacious amateur sleuth.

The case against Sana is strong, but as Kausar discovers, the murder victim had many enemies. If only the ghosts of Kausar’s past would stop haunting her present-day investigation!

Jalaluddin, who has crossed into crime fiction from the romantic comedy genre, doesn’t skimp on plotting — the whodunit twist caught me pleasingly flat-footed — but shines most with character and community, showing the complexities of mother-daughter relationships and the variability of longtime friendships. “Detective Aunty” is the first in a new series and I certainly welcome more installments.

by Michael McGarrity

Reading Michael McGarrity’s noir novel NIGHT IN THE CITY (Norton, 263 pp., $28.99), about the midcentury death of a Manhattan socialite named Laura Neilson, I found it difficult to avoid thinking about Vera Caspary’s 1943 classic suspense novel “Laura” (and the equally classic film adaptation featuring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews). While I wished for more structural innovation along the lines of what Caspary accomplished, I did enjoy McGarrity’s more conventional narrative here: A man finds his ex-lover murdered and must clear his name, rooting out widespread corruption as the atmosphere thickens.

The man is the assistant district attorney Sam Monroe, who dated Laura for a time and never really got over the way she broke up with him by bringing a new flame to the local bar that was “their private haunt and rendezvous.” So when she summons him to her Manhattan penthouse, off Sam goes, waved in by an expectant doorman — only to find her body, his Army dog tags wrapped around her neck. One thing is clear: He’s been set up. With the help of an intrepid private eye and his former lover’s diary, Sam sets out to find her killer.

McGarrity paints a seedy portrait of a bygone New York that pulses with life, lust and larceny.

by Leonie Swann; translated by Amy Bojang

Finally, it gives me great pleasure that Swann’s exceedingly delightful Sheep Detective books are once again available for American audiences. “Three Bags Full,” first published in 2005 and reissued in February, introduced an intrepid flock on the case of who had killed their beloved shepherd. In BIG BAD WOOL (Soho Crime, 384 pp., $28.95), the sheep — including Zora, “a Blackface sheep with a weakness for the abyss,” Ramesses, a “nervous young ram full of good ideas,” and Miss Maple, “the cleverest sheep in the flock and maybe even the world” — return with a new minder, Rebecca.

They’re wintering next to a French château, which sounds idyllic, but the disappearance of other sheep, the mounting deaths of deer and, eventually, a human, strike fear in the hearts of the flock, who are worried they or their shepherd may be next. Is it a werewolf, the shape-shifting creature called Garou, as the local goats seem to believe? Or a more prosaic yet sinister culprit? How the sheep discover the truth will enchant readers who pay close attention.

Culture

Book Review: ‘Warhol’s Muses,’ by Laurence Leamer

Published

20 hours ago

May 10, 2025

Press Room

Book Review: ‘Warhol’s Muses,’ by Laurence Leamer

Leamer is undeniably excellent at setting a scene, especially a louche one. He knows just when to have someone wonder if he’s caught crabs from a couch or a crotch. And Leamer is very good on rich people playing at being disheveled, tuned to the comic possibilities of that particular brand of tourism. (Holzer, of Florida real estate wealth, announces after seeing the Stones for the first time that “they’re all from the lower classes. … There is no class anymore. Everyone is equal.” Leamer adds that Holzer’s “maid and butler might have disagreed.”) Nearly every page has at least one great sleazy anecdote or pinch of gossip.

The problem is that so many of these scenes, however expertly set, are variations on the same stale theme of boomers getting up to wild stuff because the times they were a-changin’. Does anyone still need reminding that “the ’60s was a decade of radical political and cultural dissent”? Or that it was once considered shocking that a high-culture figure such as Rudolf Nureyev could go straight from a performance of “Swan Lake” to dancing “to rock ’n’ roll in a nightclub wearing dungarees. Dungarees! Not a suit and tie like some uptight New York businessman”? Reading this book felt akin to being trapped in an endless Time-Life loop of jingle jangle mornings, lazy Sunday afternoons and warm San Franciscan nights, the author providing the stentorian voice-over as the usual footage rolls by: Bob Dylan “would soon emerge as the poetic troubadour of the ’60s”; Brian Jones, “addicted to drugs and sex … was on a short road to an early death”; Jim Morrison, “a troubadour of the counterculture … wrote poetic lyrics that chronicled the lives of his generation.”

Such minor sins might have been forgiven had I ultimately gleaned some deep or unforeseen insight into the lives of the book’s subjects — a group that includes Ultra Violet, Ingrid Superstar, Brigid Berlin and other Factory figures — or, failing that, into Andy Warhol’s work. But I got neither. Nor was I convinced by the whopping claim that “without his Superstars, Warhol might never have become a world-celebrated artist.”

Meeting these 10 historical actors in roughly chronological order as they enter Warhol’s life, one has a view of the artist and his milieu that actually narrows rather than widens. Warhol, a shape-shifter so manic and intense that he could slide into several personas in the span of a single season, is here reduced to a necessarily static figure so that the women can bounce off him. Which is fine as a narrative strategy, but then not much happens to the women, either. As each one flickers into view, her upbringing (often troubled) is dutifully covered before she provides some service to Warhol — as entertainment, as emotional consort, as visual material, as key holder to Park Avenue penthouses — and then fades out to make room for the next one. (Sedgwick is the exception, a frequent and always beguiling presence; Solanas, the would-be assassin, and not one of the 10 Superstars, stands out as foil rather than helpmeet, but appears only briefly.)

Rarely is there any sense of genuine collaboration or exchange. The book’s subtitle gives away the game: In the end, these women of varied backgrounds, with their respective dreams and desires, are all here to play the same passive role — to be inevitably and unsurprisingly “destroyed by the Factory fame machine.”

Culture

Book Review: ‘The Family Dynamic,’ by Susan Dominus

Published

2 days ago

May 9, 2025

Press Room

Book Review: ‘The Family Dynamic,’ by Susan Dominus

Take the Murguia family: Amalia and Alfredo immigrated from a small region in central Mexico to Kansas City, and had seven children, five of whom shared three beds in one of the house’s two bedrooms. Alfred, one of the older children, excelled academically and was the first in his family to enroll in college — and, at every stage, helped guide his siblings into a variety of educational and social opportunities. As Dominus writes, “What the siblings had going for them above all else was one another.” They “pushed one another but also provided logistical support, connections and counsel,” along with “unquestionable loyalty.”

Similarly, the Chens, who immigrated from China after having violated that country’s one-child policy, settled in Virginia, where they opened a restaurant. While the parents had high standards, they had little time to guide their children. Instead, their cousin tells Dominus that “when he pictures one Chen child playing piano, a sibling is on the bench as well, refining the younger sibling’s technique; they leaned over homework together, the older teaching the younger.”

In large measure, the families Dominus portrays are not particularly well off. But what she calls “enterprising parents” go to great lengths to expose their children to music, theater, museums, libraries and, most important, mentors. One of the customers at the Chens’ restaurant was the head of a high school marching band; he volunteered to give their child lessons — and that child became a drum major.

Laurence Paulus, a producer of arts television programming and of modest means, took his children to openings at the Metropolitan Opera. Unable to afford tickets, they sat outside the theater to absorb the charged atmosphere, a transistor radio broadcasting the music. They waited in line for free performances of Shakespeare in the Park; they played music at home. One daughter became a world-famous theater director; another, the principal harpist in one of Mexico’s premier orchestras; their brother would co-found NY1, one of the nation’s first 24-hour community TV stations.