Browsing Area Book of the Week, May 6, 2013.

 The Reversal by Michael Connelly Library Call Number:PSO51165R48 2010.

          Mickey Haller, hero of Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer, returns a third time to the Los Angeles county courthouse, but with a twist—this time he’s working the other side of the bench, prosecuting Jason Jessup, a man who has spent 24 years in prison for killing a child before DNA evidence got his sentence reversed.  The District Attorney wants to retry him, but doesn’t want his office tainted by failure if the reversal is upheld.  He offers Haller a proposition: convict Jessup and your ex-wife, currently prosecuting criminals in the Valley, far from LA, gets out of exile and returns downtown.  Haller, in turn, agrees, as long as his half-brother, Harry Bosch, can be the chief investigator.  Both of them believe Jessup is guilty.  And since both have daughters about the age of Jessup’s victim, they both have an emotional stake in putting him back behind bars.

          So begins another taught courtroom drama from a writer who matches Scott Turow in turning legal cases into page turners.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, February 4, 2013.

Devil in the Grove: the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King.  Library Call Number: KF224.G76K56 2012.

From the liner notes: In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming with cheap Jim Crow labor. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, vicious Sheriff McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves. Then the Ku Klux Klan rolled into town, burning homes and chasing hundreds of blacks into the swamps. So began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as "Mr. Civil Rights," into the fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the "Florida Terror" at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight--not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall's NAACP associates and Marshall had endured threats that he would be next. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI’s unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”