Luisa "Lu" Brant is the newly elected--and first female, state's attorney of Howard County, Maryland, a job in which her widower father famously served. Fiercely intelligent and ambitious, she sees an opportunity to make her name by trying a mentally disturbed drifter accused of beating a woman to death in her home. It's not the kind of case that makes headlines, but peaceful Howard county doesn't see many homicides. As Lu prepares for the trial,...

"Paul Madriani, now a brilliant criminal defense attorney, was once a promising associate with Potter, Skarpellos, a prestigious law firm. One of its co-founders, his faultless reputation has earned him a probable nomination to the U. S. Supreme Court -- until the aftermath of an affair with Ben Potter's wife. Paul has left the firm and taken up a self-imposed exile in a small solo practice. On the eve of the nomination, Potter is found dead, an apparent...

John Grisham's first work of nonfiction, an exploration of small town justice gone terribly awry, is his most extraordinary legal thriller yet. In the major league draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the State of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A's, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory. Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits--...

A skeptical attorney defends a Catholic priest accused of criminal negligence after a "possessed" girl he performed an exorcism on dies. Based on the true story of Anneliese Michel, a young German Catholic woman who died in 1976.

The lives of the people of the small town of Monroe, Massachusetts are shattered when beloved friend and neighbor Ethan Ford--a Little League coach, trusted contractor, doting husband and father, and heroic volunteer fireman--is arrested for a fifteen-year-old murder which he readily admits to committing.

"This book is the most famous and important novel in South Africa's history, and an immediate worldwide bestseller when it was published in 1948. Alan Paton's impassioned novel about a black man's country under white man's law is a work of searing beauty. The eminent literary critic Lewis Gannett wrote, " We have had many novels from statesmen and reformers, almost all bad; many novels from poets, almost all thin. In Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved...

The American humorist's classic novel, depicting human nature under slavery, tells the story of two infants, one slave, one free, that were switched at birth.

Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, the wealthy Thomas Kinnear, and of Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Now serving a life sentence, she claims to have no memory of the murders. As Dr. Jordan tries to help her remember, he hears of the turbulent relationships in the Kinnear household and the alarming behavior of a fellow servant.

"In 1970, Willie Traynor comes to Clanton, Mississippi, in a Triumph Spitfire and a fog of vague ambitions. Within a year, the twenty-three-year-old finds himself the owner of Ford County's only newspaper, famous for its well-crafted obituaries. While the rest of America is in the grips of turmoil, Clanton lives on the edge of another age--until the brutal murder of a young mother rocks the town and thrusts Willie into the center of a storm. Daring...

The author recounts his experience with the American criminal justice system as the foreman of a sequestered jury debating the guilt or innocence of an individual accused of a brutal murder.