About this item

Lachlan Smith won great critical acclaim for his first novel in the Leo Maxwell series, Bear Is Broken, which won the Shamus Award for best first P.I. novel and was a Kirkus Reviews best book of the year. William Bernhardt called it "one of the best debuts I've read in years." The second Leo Maxwell mystery, Lion Plays Rough, continued the story, and now, in the utterly suspenseful Fox Is Framed, Smith confronts anew the drama that has haunted Leo--and his recently brain-damaged elder brother, Teddy--since childhood. Faced with evidence of stunning prosecutorial misconduct, a San Francisco judge has ordered a new trial for the Maxwell brothers' father, Lawrence, who was convicted of killing their mother twenty-one years before. A prison snitch soon turns up dead, with Lawrence the only suspect, and Leo teams up with hotshot attorney Nina Schuyler to defend Lawrence against murder charges both old and new.



About the Author

Lachlan Smith

I'm a lawyer who writes novels. I was a Richard Scowcroft Fellow in the Stegner Program at Stanford and afterward graduated from law school at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall. While in law school, I worked at the San Francisco Public Defender's Office. From day one, I knew that I wanted to write about that world.

I'm an entertainer, not a documentarian, so nothing in the books comes from real life, most of which wouldn't be believable as fiction, anyway. What is real in the books is the drama of idealism colliding with the moral ambiguity of criminal law, and the sleepless anxiety of a young lawyer who has taken on far more than he can handle. I can assure you that Leo's practice is a good deal more exciting than the practices of most lawyers I know.

Happy reading!



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