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Everybody is guilty, but some people are more guilty than others.
Los Angeles, 1995
In 1995, LA was the three-ring circus of criminal law.
In January, Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madam, was convicted of pandering and sentenced to three years in prison. The retrial of the Menendez brothers for the murder of their parents in Beverly Hills was scheduled to begin in August, and the media was already all over it.
And then, of course, there was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of criminal law in 1995: the O. J. Simpson trial televised live every day by Court TV. Nobody in LA talked about much of anything else.
When people weren’t actually watching the Simpson trial on TV, they were watching one of the dozens of interview shows that had sprouted up on cable television to talk about it. None of those shows was bigger than Larry King Live, and Charlie had been invited on a few times to provide commentary on the Simpson trial. He had always politely refused, but Sandy Bouchier, his much older partner, urges him to reconsider.
Sandy has a towering public profile. Charlie has almost none. And that's the reason Sandy nudges Charlie to say yes to Larry King. If Charlie goes on television as a commentator on the O. J. Simpson trial, he will be building up his own public profile as insurance against the day that Sandy is no longer around to be the firm’s big attraction.
To Charlie’s amazement, talking about O. J. Simpson on Larry King Live turns him into an overnight media sensation, and his sudden notoriety brings a flood of new clients to Bouchier & Trust. Suddenly, Charlie’s life is consumed by being on television and running the firm, not by actually practicing law, and he’s considerably less than thrilled by that.
On top of everything else, Charlie has his very own ring to look after in the criminal trials circus that is LA in 1995. He represents a young woman named Grace David who shot and killed a man called Johnny Danger, and yes, that’s his real name. Danger was a thug-about-Hollywood who was in a relationship with Lana David, Grace’s mother, a big movie star back in the 70s who hasn’t been seen much in the last twenty years. Grace says she discovered Danger strangling her mother, so she grabbed her mother’s gun out of a bedside table and shot him.
It’s a simple case of justifiable homicide, isn’t it? No big mystery. Lana asks Charlie to represent Grace, and that’s the way he decides to play it.
Still, in normal times, he knows that a case like this would be one the media would follow obsessively, but 1995 isn't a normal time. It's OJ time, and OJ is drowning out everything else. That's just fine with Charlie. He'd rather be a working trial lawyer than a media celebrity any day, and defending Grace David is his chance to get back to that.
But here’s the thing. There’s something funky about the Grace David case, and Charlie can’t quite put his finger on exactly what it is. He believes what Grace and Lana have told him, but he doesn’t believe they’ve told him everything.
Is the missing part of the story something Charlie needs to know to defend Grace, or is it something he would be better off not knowing? And does he really want to find out?
In Hollywood, the biggest crime isn't murder. The biggest crime is getting caught.
For fans of Michael Connelly's Lincoln Lawyer series and John Grisham's legal thrillers comes a fresh voice in courtroom drama, set against the sun-soaked darkness of 1990s Los Angeles.
Genre: Mystery
Los Angeles, 1995
In 1995, LA was the three-ring circus of criminal law.
In January, Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madam, was convicted of pandering and sentenced to three years in prison. The retrial of the Menendez brothers for the murder of their parents in Beverly Hills was scheduled to begin in August, and the media was already all over it.
And then, of course, there was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of criminal law in 1995: the O. J. Simpson trial televised live every day by Court TV. Nobody in LA talked about much of anything else.
When people weren’t actually watching the Simpson trial on TV, they were watching one of the dozens of interview shows that had sprouted up on cable television to talk about it. None of those shows was bigger than Larry King Live, and Charlie had been invited on a few times to provide commentary on the Simpson trial. He had always politely refused, but Sandy Bouchier, his much older partner, urges him to reconsider.
Sandy has a towering public profile. Charlie has almost none. And that's the reason Sandy nudges Charlie to say yes to Larry King. If Charlie goes on television as a commentator on the O. J. Simpson trial, he will be building up his own public profile as insurance against the day that Sandy is no longer around to be the firm’s big attraction.
To Charlie’s amazement, talking about O. J. Simpson on Larry King Live turns him into an overnight media sensation, and his sudden notoriety brings a flood of new clients to Bouchier & Trust. Suddenly, Charlie’s life is consumed by being on television and running the firm, not by actually practicing law, and he’s considerably less than thrilled by that.
On top of everything else, Charlie has his very own ring to look after in the criminal trials circus that is LA in 1995. He represents a young woman named Grace David who shot and killed a man called Johnny Danger, and yes, that’s his real name. Danger was a thug-about-Hollywood who was in a relationship with Lana David, Grace’s mother, a big movie star back in the 70s who hasn’t been seen much in the last twenty years. Grace says she discovered Danger strangling her mother, so she grabbed her mother’s gun out of a bedside table and shot him.
It’s a simple case of justifiable homicide, isn’t it? No big mystery. Lana asks Charlie to represent Grace, and that’s the way he decides to play it.
Still, in normal times, he knows that a case like this would be one the media would follow obsessively, but 1995 isn't a normal time. It's OJ time, and OJ is drowning out everything else. That's just fine with Charlie. He'd rather be a working trial lawyer than a media celebrity any day, and defending Grace David is his chance to get back to that.
But here’s the thing. There’s something funky about the Grace David case, and Charlie can’t quite put his finger on exactly what it is. He believes what Grace and Lana have told him, but he doesn’t believe they’ve told him everything.
Is the missing part of the story something Charlie needs to know to defend Grace, or is it something he would be better off not knowing? And does he really want to find out?
In Hollywood, the biggest crime isn't murder. The biggest crime is getting caught.
For fans of Michael Connelly's Lincoln Lawyer series and John Grisham's legal thrillers comes a fresh voice in courtroom drama, set against the sun-soaked darkness of 1990s Los Angeles.
Genre: Mystery
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