Jussi Adler-Olsen

#2

Mark Dooher is the last person anyone would suspect of a savage, bloody murder--the most hate-filled crime one veteran detective had ever come across. But Dooher, a prosperous attorney and prominent Catholic, is the first man San Francisco detective Abe Glitsky suspects. Soon Dooher is standing in the sights of the great, flawed machine called the criminal justice system. And Mark Dooher, a paragon of success and a master of all he touches, is about to be indicted for murder. As the Dooher trial begins, dozens of lives are drawn into the drama, from the men and women who knew Mark Dooher best to those whose fates are now entwined with his. For Wes Farrell, an attorney struggling with his own sense of failure, the defense of Mark Dooher will mean a chance at self-respect. For beautiful, aspiring attorney Christina Carrera, the case leads to a dangerous liaison with Dooher, who has wanted more than anything to have this woman by his side and in his bed. And for Abe Glitsky, whose wife is dying of cancer, the trial is a nightmare of DNA evidence, shaky witnesses, and long odds: Dooher, the unofficial consigliere of the Archbishop of San Francisco, has the Catholic Church on his side. As the trial builds to a crescendo, as evidence is sifted and witnesses discredited, as Farrell rises to heights he never knew he could reach and Abe Glitsky grieves, a woman emerges from Mark Dooher's past. Her story will change the role of nearly every player in this trial, and ignite a chain reaction of truth and violence that will alter lives forever. (from Amazon)

#3

1956

A century after Appomattox, the civil rights movement won full citizenship for black Americans in the South. It should not have been necessary: by 1870 those rights were set in the Constitution. Journalist Lemann describes an insurgency that changed the course of American history: from 1873 to 1877 white Southern Democrats waged a campaign of political terrorism to create chaos and keep blacks from voting out of fear for their lives and livelihoods, aiming to overturn the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and challenge President Grant's support for the emergent structures of black political power. The remorseless strategy of well-financed "White Line" organizations culminated in a bloody, corrupt election in which Mississippi was "redeemed" —That is, returned to white control. This led to the death of Reconstruction— and of the constitutional rights of the former slaves. We are still living with the consequences.