The Burning Man

From bestselling author Phillip Margolin, a fast-paced legal thriller packed with page-turning suspense.

Peter Hale is a young attorney struggling to make his own mark in his fathers venerable law firm when he is presented with the opportunity of a lifetime. During the trial of a multimillion-dollar case, Peters father, the lead counsel, suffers a heart attack and asks Peter to move for a mistrial until hes feeling better. Peter decides this is his only chance to prove to his father that he is the terrific lawyer he knows himself to be, and he chooses to carry on with the case against his fathers wishes. In his zeal to prove himself, Peter neglects his client and ends up losing everything—the case, his job, and his father.

Unemployed and disinherited, Peter takes the only job he is offered—that of a public defender in a small Oregon town. He hopes that if he can make good there, he can reinstate himself in his fathers good graces. But his ambition again gets the best of him when he takes on a death-penalty case, representing a mentally retarded man accused of the brutal hatchet murder of a college coed. Hes in way over his head, and its only when Peter realizes that his greed and his ego may end up killing his client that he begins to understand what it really takes to be a good lawyer—and to become a man.