with Nancy Allen
We are delighted to welcome novelist Nancy Allen to Omnimystery News, courtesy of Partners in Crime Tours, which is coordinating her current book tour. We encourage you to visit all of the participating host sites; you can find her schedule here.
Nancy's debut thriller is The Code of the Hills (Witness Impulse; April 2014 mass market paperback and ebook formats), and she titles her guest for us today "Keeping the Thrill in Legal Thrillers".
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Photo provided courtesy of
Nancy Allen
I'm a trial lawyer; of course I like legal thrillers. From To Kill a Mockingbird to Presumed Innocent to A Time to Kill, they provide some of the smartest fiction around.
So I was shocked to see the genre dismissed by a blogger who recently wrote, “The problem with legal thrillers is that they're all alike.”
Au contraire! Legal thrillers offer tremendous variety; try comparing Defending Jacob to The Firm. They don't bear the same stamp or follow a formula; those books could hardly be more dissimilar.
As I attempted to ascertain the seed of the blogger's conclusion, I thought about the common threads of courtroom dramas. It's true that the setup of the courtroom itself is uniform. We've all seen it, whether in life or fiction; every courtroom is essentially the same. The judge sits at the bench in a black robe, with the witness stand to his/her left; the counsel tables face the court. Twelve jurors sit in a jury box near the witness, and the public is confined to a gallery behind the lawyers and their clients.
But what happens in that courtroom is a kaleidoscope of infinite variety. The law is a human system, and legal cases have as many quirks and foibles as people do. Witnesses may change their story, or fail to appear, or lie. The attorney will have moments of brilliance followed by a stumble or goof. Juries get the verdict right, most of the time (I am an advocate of the jury system), but sometimes not. And the judges, while they are outfitted in identical black uniforms, are anything but uniform in attitude, demeanor, and opinion.
And every case in court has a backstory — which always comes from disharmony, or unhappiness, or disappointment: the seamy side of life. Someone has done someone else wrong, and the injured party is determined to see justice done. People want retribution or compensation or payback or revenge. The courtroom isn't about making people happy; that's the job of a fairy godmother. The courtroom is a place people go to get even. And stories that come from that environment are compelling.
In my novel, The Code of the Hills, assistant prosecutor Elsie Arnold is assigned a sexual abuse case that grows more problematic with every passing day. Witnesses trip her up, and Elsie's own errors of judgment threaten the outcome. Worse, it's a case she can't afford to lose; the safety of three young girls hangs in the balance.
At its core, every legal thriller is about winning or losing. The prospect of failure — and what's at stake — is inherently dramatic. In the courtroom, no one declares a tie.
And every court case, whether in fact or fiction, is about people who are fighting with each other. Conflict is the nature of the profession; it's what it's all about. Now, really — what's more interesting than that?
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Nancy Allen is a member of the law faculty in the College of Business at Missouri State University. She practiced law for 15 years, serving as Assistant Missouri Attorney General and as Assistant Prosecutor in her native Ozarks. When Nancy began her term as prosecutor, she was only the second woman in Southwest Missouri to serve in that capacity. During her years in prosecution, she tried over 30 jury trials, including murder and sexual offenses, and she served on the Rape Crisis Board and the child protection team of the Child Advocacy Council.
For more information about the author, please find her on Facebook and Twitter.
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The Code of the Hills
Nancy Allen
An Ozarks Mystery
To uncover the truth, she'll have to break the code of the hills …
Elsie Arnold may not always have it all together, but a raucous night at the bar now and then is just how she blows off steam after a long week of hard-fought trials. When she is chosen to assist on a high-profile incest case, Elsie is excited to step up after four years of hard work as an attorney for the prosecutor's office, and ready to realize her ambition of becoming the Ozarks' avenging angel. There might even be media attention.
But as soon as Elsie she begins to sink her teeth into the State of Missouri vs. Kris Taney, things start to go wrong — which is when her boss dumps the entire case on her. The star witness and victim's brother, who has accused Taney of sexually abusing his three daughters, has gone missing. The three girls, ages six, 12, and 15, may not be fit to testify, their mother won't talk, and the evidence is spotty. To make matters worse, it seems that some people in town don't want Elsie to lock Taney up — judging by the death threats and chicken parts left for her to find.
Elsie is determined to break the code of silence and find out what really happened, refusing to let a sex offender walk, but the odds — and maybe the community — are against her. Even as Elsie fights the good fight for her clients, she isn't so different from them: her personal life is taking a one-two punch as her cop boyfriend becomes more and more controlling. And amidst all of the conflict, the safety of the three young Taney girls hangs in the balance.
