Courtroom Drama: Crime Fiction that Brings Readers into the Courtrooms

Earl Thomas is a mild-mannered tax collector, Laura Hurtado-Perez is a doctor who uses her work to try to forget the pain and heartbreak of her personal life, and Joseph Cole, the head of his local neighborhood watch, is obsessed–perhaps inappropriately so–with the lives of his neighbors. In other circumstances, these people might not have ever met each other. But they are three of the jurors–with Thomas as the reluctant foreman–in a gripping murder trial in Miami: Gabriel Soto is accused of murdering Melina Mora, and there seems to be strong evidence linking Soto to the crime. Meanwhile, on the other side of the jury box, the prosecutor, defense attorney, and even the judge know all too well that the members of a jury–each with his or own life story–can sway the outcome of a case.

Stafford Lee Penney is the best lawyer in the coastal city of Biloxi, Mississippi. But when his wife is killed, and he becomes the police’s main suspect, his personal and professional lives both go off the rails. Penney starts over, taking on a second job as a beach lifeguard while continuing to practice law, and mentoring a law student. This strange new life seems to be going well, until Penney is accused of murder a second time: the wife of the man he defended in an earlier murder case. It falls to Penney to determine what happened, and to clear his name once and for all.

In his years working with the Edinburgh police, Inspector John Rebus was known to break a few rules along the way in his pursuit of justice. But the now-retired inspector is on trial, in a messy case involving a key figure of Edinburgh’s criminal underworld, a corrupt police officer, and a tangled web of other morally gray people. Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke, once Rebus’s protegee, is investigating the case of a police officer–the center of a major case of police misconduct–who has gone missing. The secrets that Clarke unearths could bring about the downfall of several high-ranking police officials, and even Rebus himself.

A young woman’s body is found in the water, in horrible condition, just off the Virginia coast. Was she a drowning victim, with her injuries inflicted by a boat propellers? Or could she have been murdered, possibly by her own boyfriend? Dr. Kay Scarpetta is called in as an expert witness during the trial in Alexandria. The trial is mayhem, with a zealous commonwealth attorney trying to poke holes in Kay’s testimony, and protesters howling for justice. But the trial is only the tip of the iceberg. Soon after, the presiding judge’s sister–who works for the CIA–is found dead in her home, and a whole host of other people–up to and including the President of the United States–find themselves directly in harm’s way. It falls to Kay to investigate what is going on, and to face down a particularly devious enemy.