Leo Maxwell

This Shamus Award–winning mystery was named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and Deadly Pleasures. Leo Maxwell grew up under the care of his older brother, Teddy, a successful yet reviled criminal defense attorney, after their father was jailed for their mother's murder. Now a rookie lawyer, Leo must be there for Teddy after he's shot in the head and falls into a coma. Given that Teddy has enemies on both sides of the law in San Francisco, Leo realizes the search for his brother's shooter falls on him. But as he begins to examine the life of a brother he barely knew, Leo uncovers a list of suspects longer than he imagined. With the gunman still on the loose, Leo needs to find him fast-in this suspenseful novel that won the 2014 Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel.

Now working as a criminal defense attorney in Oakland, Leo Maxwell thinks he's found a new client after a mysterious woman knocks him off his bicycle with her car. She just so happens to have a brother who needs defense on a murder charge. Leo readily agrees and dives right into the investigation. After taking a series of photographs that seem to blow the lid on corruption in the police department, Leo quickly discovers he's been had. His client already has representation-one of Oakland's most renowned gangland lawyers-and claims he doesn't have a sister. Drawing the ire of criminals and crooked cops alike, Leo is soon framed for murder. Just as he thinks he's getting closer to the truth, danger is getting even closer.

Lachlan Smith won great critical acclaim for his first novel in the Leo Maxwell series, Bear Is Broken, a Shamus Award finalist and a Kirkus Reviews best book of the year that William Bernhardt called "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. Working the streets while Nina handles the action in the courtroom, Leo is forced to confront the darkness at the center of his life as he follows a trail of corruption and danger that leads to the very steps of City Hall. A tense, twist-filled courtroom procedural, Fox Is Framed barrels toward an unexpected conclusion, as Leo struggles to do right both by the law and his blood.

In Panther's Prey, the latest novel from Shamus Award winner Lachlan Smith, tragedy once again strikes near the heart for lawyer-detective Leo Maxwell. After working to free his father from prison in Fox Is Framed, Leo has now left private practice and is working as a public defender in San Francisco. He and his co-counsel Jordan Walker are in the midst of trial, brilliantly defending Randall Rodrigues, a mentally ill homeless man whom they contend falsely confessed to the rape of a young San Francisco socialite. After their client is acquitted, Leo and Jordan fall into an intense relationship until Jordan is found brutally raped and murdered in her apartment. Leo, the last person known to have seen her alive, is the natural suspect, and the police are eager for payback after the Rodrigues case. The story takes a shocking turn when Leo and Jordan's freshly acquitted client walks into the police station and offers to confess to Jordan's murder. Upset by the rapidity with which the authorities accept this all-too-convenient confession, Jordan's grieving father tasks Leo with investigating his daughter's death. Leo agrees, though he knows exonerating Rodrigues will likely bring suspicion back on himself. Theorizing that he may be on the trail of a serial rapist and murderer, Leo instead uncovers a massive judicial fraud leading to the steps of the federal courthouse. In an explosive final confrontation, Leo will come face to face with an adversary far more powerful than any foe he has met thus far.

Lachlan Smith's Shamus Award–winning series continues with attorney-detective Leo Maxwell seeking an exit strategy from his family's deepening entanglement with a ruthless prison-based gang. Caught between the criminals and the FBI, Leo charts his own path in defending a young woman who was manipulated into brazenly murdering a member of the Aryan Brotherhood in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. When the consequences strike heartbreakingly close to home, Leo, his brother Teddy, and the rest of the family are forced into a winner-takes-all confrontation with men who don't care how many innocents they harm in achieving their goals. As Leo's world collapses, long-held secrets are revealed, transforming his perspective on the aftermath of the tragedy that derailed his childhood and fractured his family twenty-one years ago. The question then becomes who will get revenge first-the Maxwells or the sadistic gang leader who pursues them?