After speaking with Neal, he is convinced that the boy is innocent, but there is little evidence available. The case isn’t going anywhere, and he’s not making any fees from it. Jay could also use the money to support his family he only has one other active case on his books-a civil action case against a chemical plant dumping toxic waste into the water supply. Jay, however, knows Sandy won’t back out of the race.

If Sandy were not running for mayor, he would be the perfect attorney for Neal.

He spent his entire career in the civil courts, and he is worried he’s not up to the task. Jay, who thought he had put his legal career behind him, reluctantly takes on the case. He begs Jay to take on the case, because there is no one else he trusts with Neal’s fate. Axel’s nephew, Neal, is charged with her murder. The police find the body of Alicia Nowell, a young girl who had been out canvassing on Axel’s behalf when someone killed her. Jay doesn’t pay any attention to the election race until there is a murder in Pleasantville. A late candidate, Sandy Wolcott, enters the race he’s a very popular defense attorney. Everyone, Jay included, expects the former chief of police, Axel Hathorne, to win, but it’s not a sure thing. Pleasantville, a small African-American suburb, is expected to swing the vote. In the background, Bill Clinton has recently been re-elected President and it is time to elect a new mayor in Houston. He focuses his attention on raising his two small children and grieving her death. However, after his wife died from cancer, Jay retired from public life and now takes on very few cases. He used to work as an attorney and social activist, successfully raising class action lawsuits against big companies. Her debut novel, Black Water Rising, is the first book in the Jay Porter duology. A graduate of Northwestern University, she is also a fellow of the Sundance Institute Feature Filmmaker’s Lab. Locke is a film and television screenwriter. The book is popular with crime and thriller readers, who praise it for its layered plot and careful characterization.

Nominated for the 2016 Women’s Prize for Fiction, it won the 2016 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. The second book in the Jay Porter duology, Pleasantville (2015), Attica Locke’s thriller follows a lawyer undertaking his final deadly case.

Pleasantville by Attica Locke