Illinois Authors

Harper 2024

Set in a Lower East Side tenement in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Fourteen Days is an irresistibly propulsive collaborative novel from the Authors Guild, with an unusual twist: each character in this diverse, eccentric cast of New York neighbors has been secretly written by a different, major literary voice—from Margaret Atwood and Celeste Ng to Tommy Orange and John Grisham.One week into the COVID-19 shutdown, tenants of a Lower East Side apartment building in Manhattan have begun to gather on the rooftop and tell stories. With each passing night, more and more neighbors gather, bringing chairs and milk crates and overturned pails. Gradually the tenants—some of whom have barely spoken to each other—become real neighbors. In this Decameron-like serial novel, general editors Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston and a star-studded list of contributors create a beautiful ode to the people who couldn’t escape when the pandemic hit. A dazzling, heartwarming, and ultimately surprising narrative, Fourteen Days reveals how beneath the horrible loss and suffering, some communities managed to become stronger.Includes writing from: Charlie Jane Anders, Margaret Atwood, Joseph Cassara, Jennine Capó Crucet, Angie Cruz, Pat Cummings, Sylvia Day, Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers, Diana Gabaldon, Tess Gerritsen, John Grisham, Maria Hinojosa, Mira Jacob, Erica Jong, CJ Lyons, Celeste Ng, Tommy Orange, Mary Pope Osborne, Douglas Preston, Alice Randall, Ishmael Reed, Roxana Robinson, Nelly Rosario, James Shapiro, Hampton Sides, R.L. Stine, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Monique Truong, Scott Turow, Luis Alberto Urrea, Rachel Vail, Weike Wang, Caroline Randall Williams, De’Shawn Charles Winslow, and Meg Wolitzer!

Twenty five years ago, after a society picnic held by businessman and politician Zeus Kronon, Zeus, headstrong daughter Dita was found murdered. Her boyfriend, Cass Gianis, confessed to the crime. Now Cass has been released from prison into the care of his twin, mayoral candidate Paul Gianis. But Dita's brother Hal is convinced there is information surrounding his sister's death that remains buried. Hal's employee, former FBI Special Agent Evon Miller, teams up with Tim Brodie, a retired police officer, to investigate. After all this time, can they find evidence to place Paul Gianis, the innocent twin, at the scene of the crime?

Grand Central Pub., New York : 2010.

Picador, London : 2006.

Life would seem to have gone well for George Mason. His days as a criminal defense lawyer are long behind him. At fifty-nine, he has sat as a judge on the Court of Appeals in Kindle County for nearly a decade. Yet, when a disturbing rape case is brought before him, the judge begins to question the very nature of the law and his role within it. What is troubling George Mason so deeply? Is it his wife's recent diagnosis? Or the strange and threatening e-mails he has started to receive? And what is it about this horrific case of sexual assault, now on trial in his courtroom, that has led him to question his fitness to judge?

Penguin Books, New York : 2010.

It was a year of terrors and triumphs, of depressions and elations, of compulsive work, pitiless competition, and, finally, mass hysteria. It was Scott Turow's first year at the oldest, biggest, most esteemed center of legal education in the United States. Turow's experiences at Harvard Law School, where freshmen are dubbed One Ls, parallel those of first-year law students everywhere--Page 4 of cover.

Stewart Dubinsky plunges into the mystery of his family's secret history when he discovers his deceased father's wartime letters to his former fiancée, revealing his court-martial and imprisonment during World World II.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York : 1999.

An FBI operation is held to catch a group of corrupt judges in high places. The central figure is a crooked lawyer who bribed judges on his cases. Nabbed by the IRS for tax evasion, he agrees to be wired and serve as bait in return for a reduced sentence.

An ex-cop partner at a high-powered law firm tracks the firm's star litigator, who has disappeared with $5 million of a client's money.

Grand Central Publishing 2025

Rusty is a retired judge attempting a third act in life with a loving soon-to-be wife, Bea, with whom he shares both a restful home on an idyllic lake in the rural Midwest and a plaintive hope that this marriage will be his best, and his last. But the peace that’s taken Rusty so long to find evaporates when Bea’s young adult son, Aaron, living under their supervision while on probation for drug possession, disappears. If Aaron doesn’t return soon, he will be sent back to jail. Aaron eventually turns up with a vague story about a camping trip with his troubled girlfriend, Mae, that ended in a fight and a long hitchhike home. Days later, when she still hasn’t returned, suspicion falls on Aaron, and when Mae is subsequently discovered dead, Aaron is arrested and set for trial on charges of first-degree murder. Faced with few choices and even fewer hopes, Bea begs Rusty to return to court one last time, to defend her son and to save their last best hope for happiness. For Rusty, the question is not whether to defend Aaron, or whether the boy is in fact innocent—it’s whether the system to which he has devoted his life can ever provide true justice for those who are presumed guilty.

Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York : ©1987.

Rusty Sabich is an up-and-comer in the county prosecutor's office. He's intelligent, hard working, dependable. And, just maybe, he's also a murderer.

This suspenseful novel is about a vicious triple murder and the man condemned to die for it. Complicating the situation is that the judge who originally found the man guilty is only recently out of prison herself, having served time for taking bribes.

Grand Central Publishing 2022

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Presumed Innocent and The Last Trial returns with a riveting legal thriller in which a reckless private detective is embroiled in a fraught police scandal.For as long as Lucia Gomez has been the police chief in the city of Highland Isle, near Kindle County, she has known that any woman in law enforcement must walk a precarious line between authority and camaraderie to gain respect. She has maintained a spotless reputation—until now. Three male police officers have accused her of soliciting sex in exchange for promotions to higher ranks. With few people left who she can trust, Chief Gomez turns to an old friend, Rik Dudek, to act as her attorney in the federal grand jury investigation, insisting to Rik that the accusations against her are part of an ugly smear campaign designed to destroy her career and empower her enemies—both outside the police force and within.. Clarice “Pinky” Granum spent most of her youth experimenting with an impressive array of drugs and failing out of various professions, including the police academy. Pinky knows that in the eyes of most people, she's nothing but a screwup—but she doesn't trust most people's opinions anyway. Moreover, she finally has a respectable-enough job as a licensed P.I. working for Rik on his roster of mostly minor cases, like workman's comp, DUIs and bar fights. Rik's shabby office and even shabbier cases are a far cry from the kinds of high-profile criminal matters Pinky became familiar with in the law office of her grandfather, Sandy Stern. But Rik and Pinky feel that Chief Gomez’s case, which has attracted national attention, is their chance to break into the legal big leagues. Guided by her gut instinct and razor-sharp investigative skills, Pinky dives headfirst into a twisted scandal that will draw her into the deepest recesses of the city’s criminal networks, as well as the human mind. But she will need every scrap of tenacity and courage to unravel the dark secrets those closest to her are determined to keep hidden.

At the age of fifty, prosecutor Bill ten Boom has walked out on everything he thought was important to him: his law career, his wife, Kindle County, even his country. Still, when he is tapped by the International Criminal Court, an organization charged with prosecuting crimes against humanity, he feels drawn to what will become the most elusive case of his career. Over ten years ago, in the apocalyptic chaos following the Bosnian war, an entire Roma refugee camp vanished. Now for the first time, a witness has stepped forward: Ferko Rincic claims that armed men marched the camp's Gypsy residents to a cave in the middle of the night -- and then with a hand grenade set off an avalanche, burying 400 people alive. Only Ferko survived. Boom's task is to examine Ferko's claims and determine who might have massacred the Roma. His investigation takes him from the International Criminal Court's base in Holland to the cities and villages of Bosnia and secret meetings in Washington, DC, as Boom sorts through a host of suspects ranging from Serb paramilitaries to organized crime gangs to the US government itself, while also maneuvering among the alliances and treacheries of those connected to the case: Layton Merriwell, a disgraced United States major general desperate to salvage his reputation; Sergeant Major Atilla Doby, a vital cog in American military operations near the camp at the time of the Roma's disappearance; Laza Kajevic, the brutal former leader of the Bosnian Serbs; Esma Czarni, Ferko's alluring barrister; and of course, Ferko himself, on whose testimony the entire case rests -- and who may know more than he's telling.

One afternoon in late March, Sandy Stern, the brilliant, quixotic defence lawyer in Presumed Innocent, returns home to find his wife Clara dead in the garage. They have been married for thirty-one years. Her suicide note leaves him just four words - 'Can you forgive me?' But on the 6th March Clara had expected to live ...

The murder trial of a Black gangster accused of killing a State senator's wife, shot driving her husband's car. Question is, was the ambush meant for the senator, as police claim, or was she, in fact, the intended victim in a plot involving the senator?

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York : 2003.

In this vivid account of how his views on the death penalty have evolved, Turow describes his own experiences with capital punishment from his days as an impassioned young prosecutor to his recent service on the Illinois commission which investigated the administration of the death penalty and influenced Governor George Ryan's unprecedented commutation of the sentences of 164 death row inmates on his last day in office.