Some say that the practice of law is the art of compromise. Crafting a successful legal thriller involves a similar process of discovery, rebuttal and the occasional 11th-hour revelation for Mary and Pamela O'Shaughnessy. Eight years ago, the two sisters invented fictitious Lake Tahoe attorney Nina Reilly, who summarily argued her way onto the bestseller lists. They chose the pen name Perri by combining their first names, with a nod to a certain fictional barrister.

"We were inspired by the Perry Mason series to have a lawyer who continued through a lot of different cases," Mary says. "But he never changed; he was suave, urbane, he had his little martinis and his calm relationships that were just suggested and never really fulfilled. Nina's not like that; she's much more a character in transition." Indeed. Between running her business, juggling her love life with Carmel private investigator Paul van Wagoner, keeping her teenage son Bob out of trouble with his cyber-punk girlfriend Nikki and maintaining ties to her ex-husband, San Francisco attorney Jack McIntyre, Nina is one lawyer who has little time for happy hour.

In the new thriller Unfit to Practice, Nina's career takes a dramatic turn when her truck is stolen with three sensitive case files inside. Slowly and with sinister intent, someone begins to leak information from the confidential files to sabotage Nina's cases. When her own clients complain to the California State Bar, Nina faces disbarment and turns to the best defense lawyer she knows, ex-husband Jack. The O'Shaughnessys grew up imagining gripping crime scenarios together as kids in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Pam went on to earn a law degree from Harvard and worked for 16 years as a trial lawyer in private practice in the very Lake Tahoe Starlake Building where Counselor Reilly now resides. Mary took her English degree east to Boston, where she worked on multimedia projects in New York, Washington, D.C., and the Virgin Islands.

Somewhere in mid-career, each reached a personal crossroads. For Pam, raising a toddler sparked dreams of a more creative life. For Mary, the prospect of returning to work with three children under the age of five seemed unimaginable.

Both had been writing independently, pecking away late at night after the kids were in bed. Mary had a book with no plot, Pam a plot with no ending. Why not try collaborating and see what might happen? The idea was terrific, but the collaborative process proved a bit more challenging than it had in childhood, particularly since the two now live in different states. Pam has homes in Hawaii and Lake Tahoe, while Mary lives south of San Francisco. Eight books into their long-distance partnership, they're still working out the kinks of their admittedly idiosyncratic method of writing together.

As a rule, the one who comes up with the premise takes the lead role for that book; the two tend to alternate. The arrangement serves to break creative deadlocks.

"It doesn't mean that we don't each put in equal amounts of work on the draft, we do," says Mary. "But one person has the ultimate say. What that means is they get to do the final draft, so at a certain point you just have to let go, there's no point in arguing." The title comes early on in the story's development, and yes, as a matter of fact, it's getting harder and harder to find suitable three-word legal terms. (Previous titles in the series include Writ of Execution, Invasion of Privacy and Obstruction of Justice.) "We try to choose a legal term that says something about the plot," says Pam. "We seem to be locked into three words, and we're trying to convey some movement, some force of action. It's really difficult." "We look them up to make sure they haven't been used, at least in the last five minutes!" Mary adds.

Next, the sisters draft and submit a detailed outline to their publishers. No problem there? "Just that we throw it out after about the first eight chapters!" quips Pam. In their 1995 debut, Motion to Suppress, they even changed the killer in the fourth draft.

Each writer enjoys the surprises she has come to expect from the other.

"Actually, we're usually very amused," says Mary. "We both love seeing the characters brought to life again. Certainly, the first time you read what the other person has written it's a thrill. Then you begin to look at the nitty gritty and see all of the horrible things they've done, all the mistakes they've made. I think that's just part of the process, to build it up and then tear it down again." The two take turns with the actual writing; generally they will draft eight chapters then pass it to the other to draft the next eight and so on. Pam is the procrastinator, Mary the voice on the phone barking for pages.

"We are real perfectionists and we do have different styles so the book has to go back and forth quite a bit before we're both satisfied," says Mary.

In subsequent drafts (they generally do three complete rewrites before submitting the manuscript to their publisher), the two have learned to correct for each other's blind spots: Pam tends to slip into a passive voice, while Mary's more intricate style and fondness for compound sentences sometimes gets her "buried in language." The O'Shaughnessys say their decision to stay away from graphic sex and violence has been key to the success of the series. "We have some strict standards because we are mothers," says Pam. "We see the books as entertainment, something fun for people, excitement, vicarious adventure. It's important for us to keep the books fun." To keep the writing fun, they've allowed their central character wide berth.

"We're not sure even to this day who that character is in many ways," Mary admits. "She's a little mysterious; she's very impulsive and does things that we did not put in the proposal at any point. She's always changing and always growing, kind of like a real person to us. I'm not sure we always know what she's going to do, and that's always a lot of fun."

Jay Lee MacDonald is a freelance writer in Naples, Florida.

Jessica Speart grew up dreaming of Broadway, preparing for the day she would portray fascinating women with all the nuance and grace of Meryl Streep.

A fiery redhead from New Jersey, Speart trained at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute, which helped her to land parts in off-Broadway productions, television commercials and eventually the ABC soap opera One Life to Live, where she played the recurring role of Angela Foster.

But when success finally arrived, Speart was no longer content to play a role in someone else’s adventure; she wanted the one life she lived to be her own.

“I had studied acting since I was 13 years old and I was as focused and obsessed with that as I now am with this,” she says by phone from San Francisco, where she is researching her eighth wildlife mystery. “I loved it, but I just reached a point where I realized I wasn’t going to be Meryl Streep. It just wasn’t in the stars.” But what was? She didn’t have a clue.

Then life intervened.

“My epiphany came when I was killed off the soap opera by this one-armed scientist, and I thought, this is great, what do I do now? I had all these really crappy part-time jobs, I had broken up with my boyfriend, and I thought, something has to change. So I took all the money I had saved working catering jobs and I went to Africa I blew it on Africa.” Her travels to Kenya and Tanzania ushered in a decade spent writing magazine articles about the plight of wildlife endangered by poachers, smugglers and corporate polluters. Speart was outraged to learn that wildlife crime, including the traditional Chinese medicine black market in everything from rhino horns to bear gall bladders, is a $12-$15 billion a year industry, second only to illegal drug and arms smuggling.

Through field research, she met and earned the trust of special agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She found them as fascinating and imperiled as the endangered species they try to protect.

“It’s a very closed, tight little network. They are basically battered by their own agency; there are very few of them, they don’t get a lot of money or moral support, they’re fighting their own administration, the bureaucracy, all the powers that be, the politicians. I have always been for the underdog and I really started to tell a lot of stories about what they were up against and the agents started to open up to me.” Her desire to alert a broader readership to the plight of endangered wildlife prompted her to turn to fiction. Her 1997 debut, Gator Aide, launched her wildlife mystery series featuring Rachel Porter, a spunky Fish and Wildlife special agent who is equally at odds with both the bad guys and her own pencil-pushing superiors.

Coastal Disturbance, the latest entry in the series, finds Agent Porter up to her neck in trouble amid the swamps of southern Georgia, where she uncovers an illegal manatee water park. When the docile manatees start dying, she traces the source to toxic discharge from a powerful corporate polluter with sinister friends in high places including Porter’s own agency.

“One of the reasons mystery writers become mystery writers is because they want to see justice done,” Speart says. “You’re really frustrated with the system.” In the course of her research for the series, Speart has had a few brushes with Indiana Jones-style adventure: She’s done tequila shots with a tattooed stripper, visited a drug smuggler’s viper collection and entered a cage alone with two mountain lions.

These days, when this former actress dons a role, she’s doing it for herself and her readers.

“Things that you would never do in real life, you do when you’re researching. Rachel becomes a role; I become Rachel,” she admits. “You trade one unstable future for another, but writing has definitely been better for me.” Jay Lee MacDonald is a professional writer based in Naples, Florida.

In art as in nature, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Case in point: Alafair Burke. The daughter of acclaimed crime writer James Lee Burke was reading aloud from Cool Hand Luke at age 5 and crafting complete mystery stories with cool Burke titles such as The Case of the Cat Who Lost Its Meow long before her classmates had even mastered their ABCs.

Forget nature vs. nurture—Alafair Burke had both growing up at the foot of one of the hardest working authors in crime fiction.

“When people asked what he did, I would say he was a college professor and a writer,” Alafair recalls from Buffalo, New York, during a conference call that included her famous father. “He wrote every day in the house; that was what I would see him do. His good habits, I think, rubbed off on the kids.” Rubbed off, indeed. All four Burke children have been successful in their careers. Andree is a psychologist, Pamala a television ad producer, and Alafair, the youngest, followed her brother Jim Jr. into law as a prosecuting attorney.

“Alafair was a straight-A student from first grade all the way through Stanford law,” the proud father chimes in from the family’s summer home in Missoula, Montana. “She was Phi Beta Kappa at Reed College and graduated at the top of her class at Stanford law.” To which Alafair commences blushing in Buffalo.

“The downside of the story is she gets it from her mom!” James howls, bursting into his distinctive full-throated belly laugh.

Pearl, his wife of 43 years, is an irrepressible Beijing-born painter and photographer who once served as a flight attendant with Air America. The two met as creative writing graduate students at the University of Missouri.

The occasion of this father-daughter tele-reunion is the publication of Judgment Calls, Alafair’s debut legal thriller and first in a planned series. Samantha Kincaid, deputy district attorney for Multnomah County in Portland, Oregon, is old enough to know the ropes but young enough to care. When a 13-year-old prostitute is brutally attacked on the outskirts of town, Kincaid decides to press for an attempted murder conviction against the advice of her boss, Tim O’Donnell, who would rather accept an assault plea.

Kincaid’s moral compass quickly leads her into Portland’s darker corners, where an underage prostitution ring, a headline-making death penalty case and a serial killer make her question her own judgment calls.

Alafair admits she modeled Sam after her own experiences as an assistant Multnomah County D.A.; she spent five years there and tried more than 30 cases, most of them involving domestic violence, before accepting a teaching position at Hofstra School of Law.

“She’s a bit of a tougher egg than I am; she’s probably more of what I strive to be than what I am,” Alafair admits. “She has kind of a crazy personality where she does everything to extremes. She’s a little obsessive.” The title is a lovely double entendre, invoking both the art of the law and its very real consequences. Judgment Calls reveals what really happens in the sidebars and behind closed doors in the judge’s chambers, where life-or-death decisions are never black or white.

“That is something that I might be able to bring from my background that is unique compared to other writers. The prosecutor really wields an incredible amount of discretion,” she says. “Cases that have the potential to have really serious ramifications will be lost in the shuffle of a busy D.A.’s office where every attorney is literally handling hundreds of files a month. The vast majority of criminal cases get pled out and nobody really looks at them.” Alafair showed a knack for the well-turned book title early on. At age 6, she giggled out the title The Lost Get-Back Boogie after listening with her father to a recording of Woody Guthrie’s “Lost Train Blues.” “I went upstairs and wrote that on the title page” of the novel he was then writing, Jim recalls. “The book became infamous for setting the record at 111 as the most rejected title and book in the history of New York publishing. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize after it was finally published by LSU Press,” in 1986.

A love of law and language runs deep as willow roots in the Burke family. Jim estimates there are five generations of lawyers in his bloodline going back to his great-grandfather, Robert Perry, a Louisiana judge whose Civil War adventures Burke chronicled in last year’s White Doves at Morning. Burke himself studied pre-law before writing took a firm grip on him.

Given the bayou setting of her father’s Dave Robicheaux series, some may be surprised to find Alafair’s work set in the Pacific Northwest. In fact, Alafair was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where her father was teaching at Miami-Dade Community College, grew up from age 8 in Wichita, Kansas, where he taught at Wichita State University, and has spent most of her adult life on the West Coast.

Paternal bragging rights aside, Professor Jim gives his straight-A daughter the highest marks on her first book.

“I think this is an exceptional book. One, it’s very well written. The prose is extremely professional. The dialogue is good. It’s a tight book. Alafair always wrote good prose, regardless of the medium. Her essays are lovely pieces of writing; her legalistic writing is exceptional as well. She writes with the authority of experience, and there’s no surrogate for that.” Might Samantha Kincaid and Dave Robicheaux one day cross paths? In a strange way, they already have.

In 1988’s Heaven’s Prisoners, Robicheaux adopted a 6-year-old named Alafair, whom he saved from drowning when a plane full of illegal immigrants crashed in the bayou. In Burke’s next Robicheaux adventure, Last Car to Elysian Fields (due in September), Alafair is in Portland working on her first novel.

“I never thought about that, Robicheaux and Kincaid meeting up,” the real Alafair admits. “It’s interesting to think whether those characters would like each other based on first appearances; they’re both quick to sum people up. That would be like worlds colliding.”

A victim turns the tables on her attacker in a powerful new thriller If Jilliane Hoffman’s fiction debut, Retribution, seems sinfully rich in the stuff we crave most in a good legal thriller, it’s because she prepared the book from scratch using only the finest ingredients: one part Thomas Harris, one part James Patterson and one part John Grisham. The result is a psychological nail-biter that moves at lightning speed through a series of jury-jolting courtroom revelations. The former Miami prosecutor had a killer idea for a psychological thriller about a rape victim who ends up prosecuting her assailant. At her husband’s suggestion, Hoffman left her high-profile dream job as the regional legal advisor to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the state equivalent of the FBI, to stay at home in Fort Lauderdale with their two children, ages four and six, and write fiction.

While the book-buying public will deliver its verdict shortly, Retribution has already been found guilty of movie blockbuster potential by Warner Bros., which paid seven figures for the film rights. Five top actresses Jodie Foster, Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger and Gwyneth Paltrow are vying for the lead. Production is expected to begin this summer.

Pardon Hoffman for being a bit thunderstruck at her beginner’s luck. After all, she had never written more than a legal brief before creating Retribution.

“What a week I had! The book was auctioned off on a Monday, it was sold in five countries by Wednesday, and then it was sold to Warner Brothers on Friday. I keep thinking I’m probably going to die a very violent death because I had such a great year. Somebody should not have that much good luck in one year.” Early buzz hints that Retribution could be this year’s Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow’s 1987 debut that cast a similarly jaundiced eye toward our often-fallible justice system.

The novel opens with the brutal rape of Chloe Larson, a New York law student who is about to marry and embark on a promising legal career. Her attacker, who wears a clown’s mask, is never found and continues to stalk her, derailing her life.

Fast-forward a decade. Chloe has reinvented herself as C.J. Townsend, a hard-nosed Miami state attorney and go-to prosecutor in high-profile capital cases whose past remains her closely guarded secret. When police apprehend a serial killer dubbed Cupid by the media (his m.o. involves surgically removing the hearts of his female victims), C.J. can’t wait to prosecute him until she hears his voice in court and, to her horror, finds herself face to face with her long-ago assailant.

Can she ethically proceed with the prosecution? Should she come clean about her relationship to the accused and risk having the case reassigned to a less competent prosecutor? Or, if she keeps her secret, can she hold herself together long enough to win a conviction? It’s a tasty dilemma, the first of several in this well-plotted page-turner that culminates in a surprise ending that will leave readers analyzing C.J.’s choices for days to come.

“That’s exactly what I was after,” Hoffman admits. “I didn’t want to have a happy ending. I wanted it to spur discussion.” Hoffman had a tough jury of one to satisfy: herself. “I wanted to make sure that it was real. I can’t stand reading a legal book and I get to a part and think, this would never happen and that would never happen and medically that couldn’t happen.” C.

J. Townsend bears much in common with her creator. Although Hoffman has never been a victim of rape, she has worked closely with victims of domestic violence and prosecuted serial rapists.

“I’ve had many a rape victim tell me their story, and as a female, if you close your eyes and think about what it might be like, you can envision it,” she says. Hoffman defends her decision to open the novel with the brutally believable rape and its even creepier aftermath. “The rape had to be such a brutal act in order for you to understand her trauma in getting over it and her need for revenge,” she says. “When you can feel the terror that the character has gone through, I think you can really empathize with the decisions she has to make later on.” Retribution also pits two women lawyers C.J. and defense attorney Lourdes Rubio against each other in what has been a male-dominated genre. “I had scenes in my head of a conflict between two females over something that would unite females and yet tear them apart. It sounds strange but it seemed like rape was one of those issues that only women could really experience a certain way, and yet if you put them on opposite ends of the same issue, it would make interesting dynamics.” Could Hoffman ever envision herself crossing the aisle and defending the accused? “I could if they were innocent, but you can’t go forward with a defense based on that premise,” she says. “Maybe I’m jaded by the system, but I couldn’t use my skills to get somebody off, then subsequently find out that they were truly guilty. It just seems to go against everything that I believe in.” With a hefty movie deal in pocket and a sequel already in the works, it seems likely that Hoffman’s future court appearances will be strictly confined to jury duty. Jay MacDonald is a writer based in Mississippi.

Musician Reed Arvin hits new note with legal thrillers Although there’s action aplenty in The Last Goodbye, the real thrill in this thriller is tuning into the caustic and nimble mind of protagonist Jack Hammond. Ejected from his high-dollar Atlanta law firm over an affair with a client, Hammond now supports himself (and a gorgeous secretary who reads Pottery Barn catalogs) by representing impoverished defendants in criminal court. “The words that enable me to pay three dollars more than minimum wage to the beautiful Miss McClendon,” Hammond reflects, “are these: If you cannot afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for you.’ ” When one of his clients dies under peculiar circumstances, Hammond steps in to find out why. His snooping leads him into the arcane world of clinical drug testing and pairs him romantically with an alluring young opera singer who has some disturbing secrets of her own.

Speaking to BookPage from his home in Nashville, Arvin admits that he’s rather taken by this new character he’s created. “I’m pretty sure that the next book [after the one now in progress] will be a Jack Hammond book,” he says. “I love the fact that he has this sort of wry insight into life. Even when all hell is breaking loose, he sees the humor in it. That’s really attractive to me. I want that in my books. I’m not going to write dour, heavy, brooding stories.” The Last Goodbye is Arvin’s second mystery with a lawyer as hero. “Both my parents were lawyers,” he notes. “My mom was a judge. I like to say that I studied law at the Les and Kay Arvin Dinner Table School of Law. It was just in the air. However, I’m not particularly attracted to law as a profession, and I don’t write procedurals. Having a lawyer as a protagonist is great because it’s a way to enter human drama. A lawyer enters a life when things are going haywire, so that’s a great starting point to tell a story. But I’m not particularly attracted to legal minutiae.” A native of Kansas, Arvin has spent most of his life as a musician and record producer. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees both in piano from the University of North Texas and the University of Miami. “Miami is so multicultural,” he says. “I got involved in some tremendous Latin bands, bands that were playing Caribbean music, salsa bands, reggae bands. I got a tremendous education in life in different cultures, one that I could have never had without being in the music business. Then I came to Nashville.” Arvin arrived in Nashville “a good 20 years ago,” he recalls, and soon took a job playing keyboard in Amy Grant’s band. He toured and recorded with the pop/gospel diva for four years. After that, Grant’s advisors tapped him to produce records for contemporary Christian music artists. “But all during that time,” he says, “I kind of had in the back of my mind that I wanted to write. I loved books, I loved great writing and I always wondered, what if . . . ?” The Wind In The Wheat, Arvin’s debut novel, came out in 1996 and found him in familiar territory. It was about a gifted young singer who gets caught up in the Christian music industry. Alas, it attracted little notice. Then, in 2001, Scribner published his first thriller, The Will. “I feel like, in a lot of ways,” he says, “that The Will was the beginning of my real writing career. That’s when I became mainstream, signed with a real agent and got a great publisher.” Instead of Kansas, which was a major setting for his first two novels, Arvin opted to locate The Last Goodbye in Atlanta. “It’s really the center of the new, affluent black culture,” he explains. “It’s ground zero. It has more in common with the United Nations than it does magnolias.” (Although Hammond is white, his love interest and some of his foes are black.) Arvin handles race matter-of-factly, bowing neither to sentimentality nor political correctness. He reached this calm perspective, he says, through his work as a musician. “Music is similar to athletics in that it is really performance-based. If you can carry the freight, nobody cares where you came from. I spent my whole life working with Latins, blacks, whites, Asians. It didn’t matter. It was all performance-oriented: Can you play? So I don’t have a lot of politically correct baggage.” In plotting how The Last Goodbye murders would be done, Arvin dipped into real life and then anchored his findings with serious research. “I had cancer,” he says, “so I had a lot of personal experience with powerful drugs that can heal you but also leave their mark on you. My own story ends well. But I had an uncle who had a much more serious and lethal kind of cancer. He basically made it a two-year mission to try to stay alive on clinical trials. So I watched from a distance the sort of mixed blessing these trials can have. That got me interested in a clinical trial as a place to set a thriller.” To be certain he was scientifically on target, Arvin enlisted an expert on gene-based synthetic drug research and persuaded him to vet every page.

Arvin’s next book is set in Nashville and has a prosecutor as its main character. Despite his love of performing and producing, he vows that he’s totally committed to writing. “Around about the time The Will came out,” he says, “a lot of things happened to me: I got divorced, I got cancer, I changed careers, my dad had a heart attack. It was unbelievable. It’s like the five stresses that you’re supposed to get in a lifetime, I got in 90 days. That’s when I made some real choices about what I was going to do with the rest of my life and where I was going to head. I knew this was my second act.” Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.