Book picks similar to
Against the Wind by J.F. Freedman


fiction
thriller
legal-thriller
mystery

Irreparable Harm


Melissa F. Miller - 2011
    Downloaded by more than one million readers!Attorney Sasha McCandless has one goal: Make partner at the best firm in town. Then a plum assignment plunges her into a world of deceit and danger.When a commercial flight crashes, killing everyone on board, she's tapped to defend the airline. It's her big chance ... high-stakes litigation for an important client. But, as she digs into the evidence, people close to the case start dying.She discovers the crash was intentional, caused by a smartphone app capable of overriding the cockpit controls. But she's not sure who she can trust with the horrifying truth. She teams up with a federal air marshal, and they race to prevent another airline disaster.Soon, Sasha finds herself with a brand-new life goal: Stop a madman before he kills her.

Gone, But Not Forgotten


Phillip Margolin - 1993
    One by one, the wives of affluent and respected men are vanishing from their homes. The only clues to their disappearance are a single black rose and a note that reads "Gone, But Not Forgotten." It is the rebirth of a horror that has already devastated a community at the opposite end of the country -- and, as it did then, terror and death will follow.Defense attorney Betsy Tannenbaum is trapped in a nightmare as the shadows of a killer darken her world. And she will soon be risking everything she has and everyone she loves to defend a cold, powerful, and manipulating client who may be a victim ... or a monster.

The Jury Master


Robert Dugoni - 2006
    He can read jurors' expressions, feel their emotions, know their thoughts. With this remarkable ability, Sloane gets juries to believe the unbelievable, excuse the inexcusable, and return the most astonishing verdicts. The only barrier to Sloane's professional success is his conscience -- until he gets a call from a man later found dead, and his life rockets out of control.

Billy Straight


Jonathan Kellerman - 1998
    Fleeing into the night, Billy cannot shake the horrific memory of the savage violence, nor the pursuit of a cold-blooded killer. For wherever Billy turns --- from Hollywood Boulevard to the boardwalks of Venice --- he is haunted by the chuck chuck sound of a knife sinking into flesh. As LAPD homicide detective Petra Connor desperately searches for the murderer, as the media swarms mercilessly around the story, the vicious madman stalks closer to his prey. Only Petra can save Billy. But it will take all her cunning to uncover a child lost in a fierce urban labyrinth --- where a killer seems right at home ...

Pretend You Don't See Her


Mary Higgins Clark - 1997
    The dying woman is convinced her attacker was after her dead daughter's journal, which Lacey gives to the police, but not before making a copy for herself. It's an impulse that later proves nearly fatal. Placed in the witness protection programme and sent to live in Minneapolis, Lacey must assume a fake identity, at least until the killer can be brought to trial. There she meets Tom Lynch, a radio talk-show host whom she tentatively begins to date - until the strain of her deception makes her break it off. Then she discovers the killer has traced her whereabouts. Armed with nothing more than her own courage and clues from the journal, Lacey heads back to New York determined to uncover who is behind the deaths of the two women...before she is the next casualty.

High Crimes


Joseph Finder - 1998
    No exceptions. The military is a tight, closed fraternity. They take it real serious. Military justice is a deadly serious business." Claire has to realize this as she prepares to defend her husband--the man she knows as Tom Chapman, but who the Army says is Ron Kubik-- on charges that he took part in a massacre of 87 civilians in San Salvador 13 years before. Full of doubts about Tom's innocence and her own ability to prove it in an unfamiliar arena, Claire is brought to exciting, moving life by the extravagantly gifted Joseph Finder, whose previous thrillers (Extraordinary Powers, The Zero Hour) are available in paperback.

The Last Juror


John Grisham - 2004
    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 his newspaper began to prosper.The murderer, Danny Padgitt, was tried before a packed courthouse in Clanton, Mississippi. The trial came to a startling and dramatic end when the defendant threatened revenge against the jurors if they convicted him. Nevertheless, they found him guilty, and he was sentenced to life in prison. But in Mississippi in 1970, life didn't necessarily mean life, and nine years later Danny Padgitt managed to get himself paroled. He returned to Ford County, and the retribution began.

The Death Factory


Greg Iles - 2014
    A long short story featuring Penn and Tom Cage that fills in a critical period in their past, one that helps to set up the action in the coming trilogy, Natchez Burning, The Bone Tree and Unwritten Laws.

Death On a High Floor


Charles Rosenberg - 2011
    Simon was an abusive boss and had recently been on the warpath, clearing the "dead wood" from the legal firm he treated as his personal fiefdom. Nearly a thousand attorneys and associates, scattered across four continents, had good reason to want Rafer dead, but homicide Detective Spritz has his eye trained on Marbury Marfan partner Robert Tarza, in particular. Tarza and his friend and colleague---and maybe a bit more---Jenna are soon forced to play detective themselves, in a race to find the real killer or killers before Spritz finishes assembling a collection of evidence that will make a very credible case against Tarza.

Speaking In Tongues


Jeffery Deaver - 1995
    One seeking only peace. The other, violence." Tate Collier, once one of the country's finest trial lawyers, is trying to forget his past. Now a divorced gentleman farmer, land developer, and community advocate in rural Virginia, he's regrouping from some disastrous mistakes in the realms of love and the law. But controversy -- and danger -- seem to have an unerring hold on Tate. Even as he struggles to rebuild his life, his alter ego is plotting his demise.Aaron Matthews, a brilliant psychologist, has turned his talents away from curing patients to far deadlier goals. He's targeted Tate, Tate's ex-wife, Bett, and their estranged daughter, Megan, for unspeakable revenge. Matthews, ruthless and hell-bent, will destroy anything that inhibits his plans. When their daughter disappears, Tate and Bett reunite in a desperate, heart-pounding attempt to find her and to stop Matthews, a psychopath whose gift of a glib tongue and talent for coercion are as dangerous as knives and guns. Featuring an urgent race against the clock, gripping details of psychological manipulation, and the brilliant twists and turns that are trademark Deaver, "Speaking in Tongues" delivers the suspense punch that has made this author a bestseller. It will leave you speechless.

Dead Certain


Adam Mitzner - 2017
    By night, she pursues her passion for singing in the darkest clubs of Manhattan.No one knows her secret, not even Charlotte, the younger sister she practically raised. But it seems she’s not the only one in the family with something to hide. When Charlotte announces she’s sold her first novel, Ella couldn’t be more thrilled…until she gets a call that her sister’s gone missing.Ella starts investigating with the help of Detective Gabriel Velasquez, an old flame in the NYPD, and what she finds is shocking. If art imitates life, then her sister’s novel may contain details of her real-life affairs. And any one of her lovers could be involved in her disappearance.Desperate to bring Charlotte home, Ella works through her list of suspects, matching fictitious characters with flesh-and-blood men. But will it be too late to save the sister she only thought she knew?

Inadmissible Evidence


Philip Friedman - 1993
    And he's not about to let millionaire real-estate tycoon and community hero Roberto Morales slip out of a murder charge--not again. Morales is being retried for the rape and murder of his mistress, Mariah Dodge. Estrada knows he needs a miracle to nail a conviction. But his sweat, pain, and emotional investment lead him to a gut wrenching possibility: the man he is trying so hard to convict may, in fact, be innocent. His life and his career hanging in the balance, Estrada struggles toward the truth. What he finds is...inadmissible evidence....

Dead Even


Brad Meltzer - 1998
    Her husband, Jared Lynch is a rising star in a Wall Street law firm. They have a wonderful marriage until they accidently find themselves on opposite sides of the courtroom.

Heartstopper


Joy Fielding - 2007
    Population: 4,160. As Sheriff John Weber would attest, the deadliest predators to date in his tiny hamlet were the alligators lurking in the nearby swamps. But that was before someone abducted and murdered a runaway teenage girl...and before the disappearance of popular and pretty Liana Martin. The pattern is chilling to Sandy Crosbie, the town's new high school English teacher. With a marriage on the rocks, thanks to her husband's online affairs, and a beautiful teenage daughter to protect, Sandy wishes she'd never come to the seemingly quiet town with shocking depths of scandal, sex, and brutality roiling beneath its surface. And as Sheriff Weber digs up more questions than answers in a dead-end investigation, one truth emerges: the prettiest ones are being targeted, the heartstoppers. And this killer intends to give them their due....Alternating between the chilling journal entries of a cold-blooded murderer and the sizzling scandals of small-town life, "Heartstopper" is Joy Fielding's most exciting novel of suspense yet.

Dark Lady


Richard North Patterson - 1999
    Once the dead man was an honest lawyer. Now Stella Marz stares at the body of her former lover, hanging from a doorway in a gruesome tableau.For Stella Marz, the search for Jack Novak's killer leads into another bizarre homicide case, back through her own past and through the city where she was born and where now--a good Catholic girl turned career woman--she is in crisis. Somewhere in this city a hidden alliance of big money, big plans, and dark secrets is fueling a great American revival. And somehow Stella Marz will bring the darkness into the light--no matter what it reveals, no matter who it destroys. . . .