But when Casey is found dead a week later, she is called to defend the one person who refused to help her, Casey’s oldest friend and dealer, Markus Finch.Officer Reese Milo is called to the case after suffering an injury he’s only recently recovered from, and his suspicions arise when his old mentor accuses Kay of lying to put him away. Reese ignores the accusations but in the course of finding out the truth, he becomes more convinced that the old man might not be lying after all.Is Kay Havelin capable of murder? Or is the old man’s accusation his last shot at revenge? Should Reese trust the man who raised him, or put his faith in a woman whose past is much darker than his own?

    As she battles to separate truth from lies, she must confront the most dreadful choice a wife can ever make. Believe that her husband is a killer. Or that she is.The woman claims to have murdered her own child. The confession turns out to be false but it starts a chain of events that leads to horrifying consequences for Mel. As each brick in the wall she has built around herself crumbles and falls away, a stark truth is revealed. Is she even the woman she thinks she is?When an ambitious detective with secrets of her own arrests Mel on a charge of murder, her world descends into chaos. Memories she thought she could trust turn out to be unreliable. Her very sanity is questioned. And Jonathan asks for a divorce.In court, facing a hostile lawyer’s harrowing questioning, Mel’s faith in herself reaches breaking point. Then the jury returns with its verdict and delivers a shocking conclusion to the trial.How much of her perfect life can Mel still believe in? And how much is total fantasy? The answer could be the difference between life and death.

    

    Marshall is flooded with patent lawyers, all of whom find work being the local voice for the big-city lawyers that need to sway a small-town jury. One of the best is James Euchre. Euchre’s new client is Amir Zawar, a firebrand CEO forced to defend his life's work against a software patent infringement. In a heated moment during the preliminary hearing, Zawar threatens the judge in court. Later that night, Judge Gardner is found murdered in the courthouse parking lot. All signs point to Zawar—he publicly threatened the judge, he was staying at a house near the courthouse, he has no alibi. Moreover, he is an outsider, a wealthy Pakistani-American businessman, the son of immigrants, who stands accused of killing a powerful white Federal judge in a small Texas town.Zawar claims his innocence, and demands that Euchre defend him. It’s the last thing Euchre wants—Judge Gardner was his good friend and mentor—but he reluctantly agrees. With the help of a former prosecutor and a local PI, Euchre must navigate the byzantine world of criminal defense law in a town where everyone knows everyone, and bad blood has a long history. The deeper he digs, the more he fears that he’ll either send an innocent man to death row, or worse, set a murderer free. Joey Hartstone is a new, resonant voice in commercial fiction, and his debut is a small-town legal thriller as big in scope as Texas. The Local crackles with tension, high stakes gambits, and a gangbuster narrative that races to the final, shocking verdict.