Paul Madriani

Paul Madriani was once a promising associate with a prestigious law firm, co-founded by his mentor, Ben Potter. But after a scandalous affair with Ben's wife, Paul left the firm to begin a brilliant career as a criminal defense attorney. Meanwhile, Ben's impeccable reputation has made him a leading candidate for the Supreme Court, until he is found dead on the eve of the nomination. As the evidence against Ben' s wife snowballs, Talia hires her former lover to defend her against the ruthless chief prosecutor, who wants to send her to the gas chamber.

In just five days, a rural college town in California is rocked by two sets of brutal double murders. When another set of bodies is found, Paul Madriani, special prosecutor, must find the killer-quickly. Physical and trace evidence lead to the arraignment of a college security guard on multiple charges of murder. While the evidence linking the suspect to the first four killings is solid, something is glaringly different with the last two, and Madriani slowly begins to realize there is another killer in their midst. It is only during the trial-when he is fighting for both the conviction of one killer and the identity of another, that Madriani discovers shocking answers that go far deeper than anyone could have imagined.

On her deathbed, Paul Madriani's wife made him promise to look after her younger sister Laurel Vega. Locked in a custody battle with her former husband Jack, Laurel stands to lose her two teenagers. Suddenly the heated custody battle becomes a murder trial when Jack's new wife is found murdered in the bathroom of his opulent home-only moments after a hot exchange with Laurel on her front porch. As the evidence mounts, Paul faces a chilling realization that his stoic sister-in-law may have actually committed murder-and with good reason.

The Judge, the explosive thriller from best-selling author Steve Martini, finds attorney Paul Madriani back in action, two years after his dazzling debut in Undue Influence. In this captivating game of cat-and-mouse, the police department's credibility and a despised judge's career hinge on the verdict of the most celebrated trial of the year. As Madriani and his new partner, Lenore Goya, dig into the evidence, their diligence pays off in an electrifying 11th-hour discovery that casts shadows of doubt into every corner of the Capital City legal system.

Martini delivers Paul Madriani's most challenging case yet: one pitting a drug-addicted mother against her daughter's newly rich grandfather in a contentious custody case that leads to criminal accusations and ultimately murder. Having moved to San Diego to be closer to the woman in his life, Madriani takes on the case of Jonah Hale, an elderly man in terrible straits. As a result of their only child Jessica's longtime drug addiction, Jonah and his wife have been raising their eight-year-old granddaughter, Amanda. On the heels of Jonah's multimillion-dollar state lottery win, Jessica revives her interest in mothering. When Jonah won't deal-maternal rights for a mega-bucks payoff-Jessica plays dirty: she accuses the old man of having sexually abused her as a child and similarly abusing Amanda now. Enter Zo Suade-a flamboyant, feminist activist with a penchant for making the objects of custody battles and their mother/plaintiffs "disappear." True to form, a week after Zo takes on Jessica's case, mother and daughter vanish. When Zo's body turns up, Jonah becomes the prime suspect. And Madriani is the man who can prove his innocence. Filled with action in and out of court, rich in characters with motives obvious and subtle, The Attorney marks the much-anticipated return of Paul Madriani.

Paul Madriani has ample reason to suspect he's representing a guilty man. Dr. David Crone, a respected medical researcher and principal in mapping the human genome, is charged with the murder of a young colleague: twenty-six-year-old Kalista Jordan, an African-American research physician whose body washed up on a beach in San Diego Bay. Forensic evidence links her murder with material in Crone's garage. Crone had both opportunity and motive: Kalista had recently ended their affair, and may have been deserting him professionally as well, moving on to a rival genetic research facility. However, when a key witness for the prosecution dies unexpectedly, leaving an incriminating note behind, Crone's innocence seems confirmed-until Madriani hits upon a potentially damning loose end.

Martini crafts yet another legal nail-biter featuring perennial favorite attorney Paul Madriani. After a lawyer friend is killed along with his client in a hail of gunfire outside the federal courthouse in San Diego, Madriani takes on another client who he believes is involved at the edges of the double murder. He takes the case not to defend the man, but to find out who killed his friend and why. Madriani is tortured by questions of conflict, his duty to a client who may have killed is friend, and the need to know the truth, wondering whether he himself had been marked for death only to have a friend die in his place. Soon he is drawn into a vortex of crime that spans the Americas. As he searches for the killer, Madriani rides the crest of a dangerous wave of international drug deals and people who murder for money. Suddenly he realizes it is not heroin or cocaine that resulted in the murder of his friend, but a priceless piece of pre-Columbian art - something so dazzling in the information it holds as to be one of the treasures of the ages. In a quest that takes Madriani from California to Mexico and the Guatemalan border, he discovers that while the motive to kill may be driven by distant, exotic, and ancient artifacts, the killer, like a serpent, lies much closer at hand.

Attorney Paul Madriani defends a soldier on trial for murder and unwittingly steps into a maze of secrets and lies that the government -- and even his client -- would rather leave undisturbed. Madriani is faced with arcane ballistics evidence, a so-called "double tap" -- two bullet wounds tightly grouped to a victim's head, shots that can only be made by a crack marksman. Madriani's client is an enigma, a career soldier who refuses to talk about his past. The victim was an alluring businesswoman and software tycoon whose empire catered to the military. The case's most damning evidence is the weapon that killed her: a handgun used only in special operations where the "double tap" is the trademark of the most skilled assassins. Madriani faces a wilderness of mirrors in a courtroom battle where every witness can hide behind "national security," where information is power and digital information is absolute power. It is a war in which the scales of justice are being tipped by evasion, deceit -- and murder. Finding the unvarnished truth has never been so elusive -- or so dangerous.

The echoes of a murder reach deep into the halls of the U.S. Supreme Court in this electrifying new thriller featuring defense attorney Paul Madriani from New York Times bestselling author Steve Martini. Terry Scarborough is a legal scholar and provocateur who craves headline-making celebrity, but with his latest book he may have gone too far. In it he resurrects forgotten language in the U.S. Constitution-and hints at a missing letter of Thomas Jefferson's-that threatens to divide the nation. Then Scarborough is brutally murdered and a young man with dark connections is charged. What looks like an open-and-shut case to most people, doesn't to defense attorney Paul Madriani. He believes there is much more to the case, and that the defendant is a pawn caught in the middle, being scapegoated by circumstance. As the trial spirals toward its conclusion, Madriani and his partner Harry Hinds race to find the missing Jefferson letter-and the secrets it holds about slavery and scandal at the time of our nation's founding and the very reason Scarborough was killed. Madriani's chase takes him from the tension-filled courtroom in California to the trail of a Supreme Court justice now suddenly in hiding and lays bare the soaring political stakes for a seat on the High Court, in a country divided, and under the shadow of power.

Defense attorney Paul Madriani gets caught in a web of deceit and murder involving Cold War secrets, a rare coin dealer who once worked for the CIA, and a furious assassin in one of the most entertaining novels yet in this New York Times bestselling series. Together with his partner, Harry Hinds, Madriani must piece together the threads of a decades-old conspiracy involving priceless gold coins, an aging American spy, a disaffected Russian soldier, and a forgotten weapon from the days of JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis. As the separate strands of the story come together, Madriani finds information that will ultimately lead him to the one person who holds the key to it all: a man some call "The Guardian of Lies". In this fascinating thriller from New York Times bestselling author Steve Martini, Paul Madriani faces his most challenging-and most urgent-case yet, a breathless story that combines fact and fiction and will hold readers captive until its final, explosive conclusion.

San Diego defense attorney Paul Madriani is still reeling from the trauma of a near nuclear explosion he helped avert at the naval base in Coronado. Threatened by federal authorities to keep quiet about the close call in California, Madriani is now faced with a new problem in the steely-eyed and alluring Joselyn Cole, a weapons control expert, who believes he has to go public with what he knows if they have any hope of stopping a similar event in the future. But Madriani has been linked to a murder of a Washington, D.C. political staffer, and authorities believe a shadowy figure called Liquida-a hired assassin known as 'the Mexicutioner'-may be responsible. And this man, as the last survivor of the attack in San Diego, might be driven by a bizarre and horrifying, star-crossed vendetta and might now be looking for Madriani himself. What Madriani and Cole begin to fear is that this madman has joined forces with a demented former radical known as the Old Weatherman, who intends to pull the city-and the country-into a vortex of terror before Madriani and Cole can find answers to the enigma that is 'the rule of nine.'

Defense attorney Paul Madriani is embroiled in a case as perilous as any he has ever faced-one that involves an angry killer who will stop at nothing short of vengeance and two missing NASA scientists who are holding secrets that a hostile government desperately wants to purchase-in blood if they must. Madriani's daughter, Sarah has evaded the man known as Liquida, and is being kept under armed guard for her own safety. But one morning Sarah slips her ring of protection. What she doesn't know is that her assailant is at this very moment waiting patiently outside in the dark. At the same time, in California two men in a parked car argue over millions in cash that could be slipping through their fingers and a scheme involving government technology-for-sale that could rock the world. Paul Madriani, his companion Joselyn Cole and his long-time law partner Harry Hinds, track Liquida not knowing that their quest will carry them deep into the vortex of international terror. It is a journey that will lead them toward a bizarre and cruel twist of nature-and the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Madriani and his party race against time to find Liquida and the scientist who is the "trader of secrets" before he can unleash the weapon that can set the world ablaze.

Defending an innocent young man, defense attorney Paul Madriani uncovers a morass of corruption and greed that leads to the highest levels of political power in this electrifying tale of suspense from New York Times bestselling author Steve Martini. One of the most successful lawyers in the country, Olinda Serna is a master at managing money as well as her influential clients. After years of fierce combat in the political trenches, Serna knows all the dirty secrets, where the bodies are buried, and how deeply they are stacked. When she's killed in a roadside crash in the high desert of Southern California, powerful heads in Washington begin to panic, worried that their secrets may not be safe anymore. Alex Ives, a friend of Paul Madriani's daughter, is accused of vehicular manslaughter in Serna's death. Ives claims he had only one drink on the night of the accident, yet he can't remember anything between the time he left for a party north of San Diego and the moment he woke up in a hospital the next morning. He's still dazed and a little bruised, but also obviously very afraid. After all, a woman is dead, and he's sure he didn't kill her. To save an innocent young man's life, the brilliant defense attorney must uncover everything he can about Serna and her clients-no matter how unsavory-a search that will lead him into a vortex of corruption, and at its center, a devious killer poised to strike again.

Defending a client accused of killing her father, attorney Paul Madriani is drawn into a treacherous conspiracy dating to World War II in this enthralling installment in the New York Times bestselling series. Paul Madriani and Harry Hinds have a new client: Emma Brauer, a woman accused in the "mercy killing" of her aged father, Robert Brauer. Insisting she's innocent, Emma tells Paul about a package sent to her father shortly before he entered the hospital. Bequeathed to him by a member of his unit from World War II, the box contains a key and a slip of paper. Emma fears that this package is connected to her father's death. When Paul's young assistant Sofia is murdered, Madriani is blindsided by the realization that Emma's fears are well-grounded. Digging into Robert's military history, Madriani discovers that other members of the Army unit Robert served with have recently died-under similarly suspicious circumstances. When he finds that the box sent to Brauer relates to a mysterious talisman that went missing at the end of the war-a feared Nazi relic known as the "Blood Flag"-Madriani and Hinds realize they are in for the fight of their lives. With Emma's life on the line and their own safety in jeopardy, Madriani must uncover the truth before the evil of the Blood Flag is allowed to spin a new web.