Michael Beck
1) Sycamore row
Author
Series
Jake Brigance volume 2
Summary
The suspense never rests when A Time to Kill's Jake Brigance fights the good fight once again. Often named an all-time favorite by John Grisham's legions of fans, the book that started it all gets a brand-new chapter. America's favorite storyteller returns to Ford County, Mississippi, where defense attorney Jake Brigance will have to fight for justice in a trial that could tear the small town of Clanton apart.
Seth Hubbard is a wealthy man dying...
2) The appeal
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Summary
In a crowded courtroom in Mississippi, a jury returns a shocking verdict against a chemical company accused of dumping toxic waste into a small town's water supply, causing the worst "cancer cluster" in history. The company appeals to the Mississippi Supreme Court, whose nine justices will one day either approve the verdict or reverse it. Who are the nine? How will they vote? Can one be replaced before the case is ultimately decided? The chemical...
3) The summons
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Summary
Ray Atlee and his brother, Forrest, receive a letter from their father, a reclusive, retired judge, instructing them to return home to Clanton, Mississippi, to discuss his estate, but the judge dies before his sons arrive, leaving behind a secret known only to Ray.
Author
Appears on list
Summary
For most of the last hundred years, Biloxi was known for its beaches, resorts, and seafood industry. But it had a darker side. It was also notorious for corruption and vice, everything from gambling, prostitution, bootleg liquor, and drugs to contract killings. The vice was controlled by small cabal of mobsters, many of them rumored to be members of the Dixie Mafia. Keith Rudy and Hugh Malco grew up in Biloxi in the sixties and were childhood friends,...
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Series
Summary
The life of a ten-year-old black girl is shattered by two drunken and remorseless white men. The mostly white town of Clanton in Ford County, Mississippi, reacts with shock and horror at the inhuman crime?until the girl?s father acquires an assault rifle and takes justice into his own hands. For ten days, as burning crosses and the crack of sniper fire spread through the streets of Clanton, the nation sits spellbound as defense attorney Jake Brigance...
Author
Series
Jake Brigance volume 3
Summary
Court-appointed lawyer Jake Brigance puts his career, his financial security, and the safety of his family on the line to defend a sixteen-year-old suspect who is accused of killing a local deputy and is facing the death penalty.
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Summary
Clay Carter, a public defender, reluctantly takes the case of a young man charged with a random street killing, assuming it is just another of the many senseless murders that hit D.C. every week. As he digs into the background of his client, Clay stumbles on a conspiracy too horrible to believe. He suddenly finds himself in the middle of a complex case against one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, looking at the kind of enormous...
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Summary
Pete Banning was Clanton's favorite son, a returning war hero, the patriarch of a prominent family, a farmer, father, neighbor, and a faithful member of the Methodist church. Then one cool October morning in 1946. he rose early, drove into town, walked into the church, and calmly shot and killed the Reverend Dexter Bell. As if the murder wasn't shocking enough, it was even more baffling that Pete's only statement about it - to the sheriff, to his...
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Summary
In a small Florida town, a young lawyer is shot to death. A young black man, a former client, named Quincy Miller is charged and convicted. For 22 years, Miller maintains his innocence from inside prison. Finally, Guardian Ministries takes on Miller's case, but the Episcopal minister in charge gets more than he bargained for as powerful people do not want Miller exonerated.
10) Camino winds
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Series
Summary
"Welcome back to Camino Island, where anything can happen - even a murder in the midst of a hurricane, which might prove to be the perfect crime . . . Just as Bruce Cable's Bay Books is preparing for the return of bestselling author Mercer Mann, Hurricane Leo veers from its predicted course and heads straight for the island. Florida's governor orders a mandatory evacuation, and most residents board up their houses and flee to the mainland, but Bruce...
11) The broker
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Summary
John Grisham delivers another legal thriller of unparalled suspense. With fourteen years left on a twenty-year sentence, notorious Washington power broker, Joel Blackman, receives a surprise pardon from a lame-duck president. He is smuggled out of the country on a military cargo plane, given a new identity, and tucked away in a small town in Italy. But Blackman has serious enemies from his past. As the CIA watches him closely, the question is not...
12) The rainmaker
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Summary
In his final semester of law school, Rudy Baylor "finds himself taking on one of the most powerful, corrupt, and ruthless companies in America -- and exposing a complex, multibillion-dollar insurance scam."
13) The partner
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Summary
A thriller on the international movement of dirty money. Its protagonist is an American lawyer who skips the country with $90 million belonging to crooks. They catch up with him in Brazil, torture him, but he does not know where the money is, his lawyer girlfriend is circulating it around the globe. Extradited to the U.S. to face various charges he is going to use the money to get off.
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Series
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Terry McCaleb, the retired FBI agent who starred in the bestseller "Blood Work, " is asked by the LAPD to help them investigate a series of murders that have them baffled. They are the kind of ritualized killings McCaleb specialized in solving with the FBI, and he is reluctantly drawn from his peaceful new life back into the horror and excitement of tracking down a terrifying homicidal maniac. More horrifying still, the suspect who seems to fit the...
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A corporate lawyer in Washington goes to war against his own company to defend the homeless. It happens after Michael Brock is abducted by a homeless man and held hostage. The homeless man is killed by a police sharpshooter and the lawyer is rescued, but the experience changes his life. Michael was in a hurry. He was scrambling up the ladder at Drake & Sweeney, a giant D.C. law firm with eight hundred lawyers. The money was good and getting better;...
16) The brethren
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Summary
In a federal prison, three former judges who call themselves "the brethren" meet in the law library to run a rougher form of justice inside their community and make some money, but when one of their scams derails, they are forced to confront the world of their own creation.
17) The last juror
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Summary
In 1970, one of Mississippi's more colorful weekly newspapers went bankrupt. To the surprise and dismay of many, ownership was assumed by a 23 year-old college dropout, named Willie Traynor. The future of the paper looked grim until a young mother was brutally raped and murdered by a member of the notorious Padgitt family. Willie Traynor reported all the gruesome details and the paper began to prosper. The murderer, Danny Padgitt was tried before...
18) My life
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Summary
President Bill Clinton’s My Life is the strikingly candid portrait of a global leader who decided early in life to devote his intellectual and political gifts, and his extraordinary capacity for hard work, to serving the public.
It shows us the progress of a remarkable American, who, through his own enormous energies and efforts, made the unlikely journey from Hope, Arkansas, to the White House—a journey fueled by an impassioned...
It shows us the progress of a remarkable American, who, through his own enormous energies and efforts, made the unlikely journey from Hope, Arkansas, to the White House—a journey fueled by an impassioned...
19) The runaway jury
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Summary
In Biloxi, Mississippi, a woman sues a tobacco company for the death of her husband from lung cancer. The protagonists are a jury fixer, that is a lawyer whose role is to assure a jury favorable to the company, and a rogue juror whom the fixer cannot eliminate or control. This is a landmark tobacco trial with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake which begins routinely, then swerves mysteriously off course. The jury is behaving strangely, and at...
Summary
Gone to Texas: The true-life story of Sam Houston, the frontier hero and statesman whose bravery and vision led to the creation of the Republic of Texas. The wife of a brutal sheriff falls for a condemned prisoner. She helps him escape. Together they do their best to elude the sheriff who has vowed to get his wife back and to take vengeance on the outlaw.
Blue River: In the small Wisconsin town of Blue River, secrets run deep. And for Henry Howland,...