Michael Beck

Seth Hubbard is a wealthy man dying of lung cancer. He trusts no one. Before he hangs himself from a sycamore tree, Hubbard leaves a new, handwritten, will. It is an act that drags his adult children, his black maid, and attorney Jake Brigance into a conflict that raises far more questions than it answers. Why would Hubbard leave nearly all of his fortune to his maid? Had chemotherapy and painkillers affected his ability to think clearly? And what...

For most of the last hundred years, Biloxi was known for its beaches, resorts, and seafood industry. But it had a darker side. It was also notorious for corruption and vice, everything from gambling, prostitution, bootleg liquor, and drugs to contract killings. The vice was controlled by small cabal of mobsters, many of them rumored to be members of the Dixie Mafia. Keith Rudy and Hugh Malco grew up in Biloxi in the sixties and were childhood friends,...

Wall street millionaire Carl Trudeau purchases an unsuspecting Mississippi State Supreme Court judge candidate when a lower court rules against one of his chemical companies for dumping toxic waste into a small town's water supply causing a cancer cluster.

In 1970, one of Mississippi's more colorful weekly newspapers went bankrupt. To the surprise and dismay of many, ownership was assumed by a 23 year-old college dropout, named Willie Traynor. The future of the paper looked grim until a young mother was brutally raped and murdered by a member of the notorious Padgitt family. Willie Traynor reported all the gruesome details and the paper began to prosper. The murderer, Danny Padgitt was tried before...

Judge Atlee has been a powerhouse in local politics and law in his hometown of Clanton, Mississippi for over forty years. But he is dying, and has turned into a recluse. He has summoned his two boys, Ray and Forrest, home to discuss his estate before he dies. Ray is a good son, recently divorced, a professor of law at the University of Virginia. Forrest is a black sheep to end all black sheep. Forrest doesn't show up at the appointed time, and Ray...

In Biloxi, Mississippi, a woman sues a tobacco company for the death of her husband from lung cancer. The protagonists are a jury fixer, that is a lawyer whose role is to assure a jury favorable to the company, and a rogue juror whom the fixer cannot eliminate or control. This is a landmark tobacco trial with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake which begins routinely, then swerves mysteriously off course. The jury is behaving strangely, and at...

Gone to Texas: The true-life story of Sam Houston, the frontier hero and statesman whose bravery and vision led to the creation of the Republic of Texas. Blue River: Depicts the powerful events that unfold in a small Wisconsin town driving 2 teenage brothers apart when later in life one brother, now a homeless derelict, arrives at the home of his brother, now a successful doctor.

LAPD Detective Harry Bosch crosses paths with FBI profiler Terry McCaleb while investigating the murder of a Hollywood actress.
Harry Bosch is up to his neck in a case that has transfixed all of celebrity-mad Los Angeles: a movie director is charged with murdering an actress during sex, and then staging her death to make it look like a suicide. Bosch is both the arresting officer and the star witness in a trial that has brought the...

Clay Carter, a public defender, reluctantly takes the case of a young man charged with a random street killing, assuming it is just another of the many senseless murders that hit D.C. every week. As he digs into the background of his client, Clay stumbles on a conspiracy too horrible to believe. He suddenly finds himself in the middle of a complex case against one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, looking at the kind of enormous...

A comprehensive history of the Confederacy moves beyond military events to examine legal structures, politics, social structures, and the economy of the South during the Civil War.