The Best Legal Thrillers: 6 Courtroom Novels Worth Reading
Legal thrillers live or die on two things: a case worth arguing and a lawyer worth following. The six novels below cover both, from insurance fraud in Memphis to a High Court judge in Gray's Inn Square deciding whether a teenager may refuse a blood transfusion.
Picks were made on standing rather than personal taste. Several have won major crime fiction awards, including the Shamus, the Macavity and the Anthony. Two have been adapted for film or television. The order reflects how much interest our own readers show, starting with the John Grisham title that draws the most attention.
The Rainmaker
Grisham's sixth novel, published in 1995, takes its title from the kind of lawyer who wins spectacular cases and enormous damages. Rudy Baylor is a third-year law student at Memphis State who picks up two clients at an elder law outreach session, including the Black family, whose son Donny Ray was denied the bone marrow transplant that could have saved him. The insurer, Great Benefit Life, is represented by a powerful Memphis firm, and Rudy ends up fighting them from a private practice he sets up with a man who has failed the bar exam six times. Justice, corruption and class run right through it.
Single & Single
John le Carré turned his attention to financial crime in this 1999 novel about a British Customs and Excise officer named Brock, who is tracking the fraudster Tiger Single. The story opens in the middle of events, with a London finance house lawyer executed in southern Turkey, then reaches back to the early 1990s and the firm's dealings with two Russian brothers in Moscow. Tiger's son Oliver, by then working as a children's magician in Devon, becomes Brock's route into an international money-laundering operation. It is a book about family loyalty as much as fraud.
The Lincoln Lawyer
Connelly's sixteenth novel introduced Mickey Haller, the Los Angeles defence attorney who works from the back seat of a chauffeured Lincoln Town Car and is half-brother to Detective Harry Bosch. The case is a wealthy Beverly Hills estate agent accused of assault, and the deeper Haller's investigator digs into it, the worse the picture gets. It won the 2006 Shamus Award and the 2006 Macavity Award and was shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. The 2011 film starred Matthew McConaughey, and a Netflix series followed in 2022.
The Brass Verdict
Haller's second outing, published in 2008, opens with the lawyer returning to work after a year recovering from his injuries and a painkiller addiction. When defence attorney Jerry Vincent is murdered, Haller inherits his caseload, including the trial of a Hollywood mogul accused of killing his wife and her lover, due to start in nine days. Harry Bosch is investigating the murder and warns Haller he could be next. It won the 2009 Anthony Award for Best Novel.
The Children Act
Ian McEwan's 2014 novel takes its title from the Children Act 1989 and has been compared to Dickens's Bleak House for its setting and its opening lines. Fiona Maye is a High Court judge specialising in family law whose marriage is collapsing just as an emergency case lands on her desk: a teenager with leukaemia, three months short of his eighteenth birthday, refusing a blood transfusion on religious grounds. Fiona visits him in hospital before ruling, and the consequences of that visit shape the rest of the book.
The Pact
The fifth novel by Jodi Picoult, published in 1998, begins with two New Hampshire families who raised their children side by side. Chris Harte and Emily Gold had been together for years when they were found at the carousel where Chris worked, Emily dead from a gunshot wound and Chris unconscious. Chris says they made a suicide pact; the state charges him with first-degree murder. His lawyer, Jordan McAfee, is interested only in the version of the truth most likely to win.
Six books, six very different ideas of what a courtroom story can do. Some are about the fight to win a case, others about what winning costs the person who argued it.