Four Courtroom Dramas

Four Courtroom Dramas contains four recent novels of mine, all of which can be purchased separately: The Trial of Eugene Bishop, The Black Swan, Presumed Dead, and Annabel Poe. The shooting of Derek Kramer, a thirty-two-year-old white man, leads to the arrest of Eugene Bishop, a black undercover cop who is charged with first degree murder. The day before Derek Kramer was killed, he had been fired from his job, and that night, he made a number of threats that were directed at those he had formerly worked with.
Eugene Bishop had been with Derek when he made the threats to commit mass murder, and the prosecutor is concerned that Eugene's defense is actually based on a concept called jury nullification. Jury nullification occurs when the members of a jury believe that a defendant is guilty but choose to acquit the person because they feel the law they are being asked to uphold is unjust or because they believe the punishment for the crime is far too harsh.
In the end, the results are not quite as clear as some might like, but this only means that the reader is the real juror in this very challenging case where the scales of justice are so evenly balanced between the competing forces of the law and the safety of innocent people. In The Black Swan, lust, incest, and murder form the backdrop of this novel where Kaitlin Devers, a beautiful seventeen-year-old woman, is charged with murdering her mother.
The trial seems to be an easy one for the two prosecutors who have been assigned to the case. After all, Kaitlin has confessed to the crime, her fingerprints are on the murder weapon, and just thirteen hours before Stacy Devers was murdered, Kaitlin told her uncle that she was going to murder her mother. But Kaitlin's lawyer has a surprise that may overturn what appears to be the obvious outcome of this case.
And this surprise is the black swan--a metaphor to describe an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. To put it very simply, a black swan event is an event or idea that no one saw coming. But will it be enough to save Kaitlin?Essentially, Presumed Dead is a murder mystery, but the mystery is not so much who committed the murder.
Maybe, in fact, there was no murder at all, but what always remains mysterious until the very end is the underlying psychological motivation of Smoky Jacobs. What did he actually do, and why did he act the way he did? For instance, it never makes a good impression when, in front of the jury, you attempt to strangle your own lawyer--especially when you're on trial for smothering your wife to death!My maiden name was Annabel Poe, but then I married Dirk Peabody, and in an unfortunate burst of romantic enthusiasm, I consented to have my last name changed to Peabody.
I say unfortunate because it wasn't long before I developed an inferiority complex and found it most difficult to survive in this strange and forbidding world. However, after I was arrested and charged with murder, a very dark side of my personality emerged when I was thrown into the limelight and had to defend myself against a number of powerful people who were determined to send me to prison for the rest of my life.
It was only after enduring the mockery of the crowd and the taunts of my persecutors that I was able to spring a trap that took everyone completely by surprise. Relentlessly tormenting the judge, who physically assaulted me and called me the biggest piece of trash to ever enter her courtroom, I came away from my trial with my dignity intact. Perhaps, now, my accusers have realized one very obvious thing about me:Sass me and I'll sass you back.
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