Hello – I am a new member here and I need some help in trying to find a legal thriller from the early 1990s (I had lost the book some years ago, and have been trying to relocate it for a long time now, but I don’t recall the title/author).
Anyway, the story basically involves a female New York prosecutor who is assigned to a case involving a man who had shot and injured some police officers when they were conducting an investigation in an abandoned New York building that he was living in. The defendant argues self-defense (claiming that he was defending the building as his “home”) and the case ends up taking on many political/racial overtones (I believe it was set in Harlem, because the book contained an excellent foreword outlining the social/cultural history of Harlem from the early 1900s to the present day). The book goes into quite a bit of detail regarding the prosecutor’s struggles in handling the politically/racially-charged case, and the effects of the case on her marriage/home life (the book had her living in Bronxville, a suburb in Westchester County, NY ).
There are two male detectives assigned to the case, and I think one of them had an Irish-sounding name (Malloy? Doyle? Or perhaps something like that?) and he is portrayed as being older, gritty and hard-drinking, while the other detective is younger/handsomer and ends up having an affair with the aforementioned female prosecutor (note: she is promoted to the Manhattan District Attorney position while the case is on-going). I don’t recall if the jury ended up convicting or acquitting the defendant (possibly an acquittal, but I’m not sure), but I do remember that there was a riot outside the detective’s police station at the end of the book right after the jury’s verdict was rendered (and the older detective ended up getting fired for attacking some of the rioters). I think the book had closed with a chance meeting at a courthouse (years after the verdict) between the female prosecutor and the younger detective, wherein they reminisced about that pivotal time in their lives during the trial.
Anyhow, I remember it being a very good book (particularly the foreword about the history of Harlem), and I only got to read it once before I lost it. So, any help would be appreciated.
Also, I’m not sure if this helps much, but I seem to recall the author using the word “truculent” quite a bit in the book (unless I am confusing it with another book I had read back then). I believe that the author was male, but I’m not sure. I had bought the book back in the early 1990s, around the time I had bought one of the three books listed below…..and I remember it being on the “new-release” shelf next to one these books (because I recall buying it together with one of these books), so it was probably published sometime in the 1991-1994 range. Back then, I tended to buy books from the same authors, but I have researched the other books from the three authors listed below, but haven’t found the one I’m looking for (so it may be a different author altogether).
Death Penalty – William Jeremiah Coughlin (originally published in 1992)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0312933576/
Mitigating Circumstances - Nancy Taylor Rosenberg (1993)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1857972384/
Inadmissible Evidence – Philip Friedman (1993)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0804108528/
Thanks for your help !