The Outsider

January 16, 2017
The hero of this implausible legal Cinderella story from Franze (The Advocate’s Daughter) is Grayson Hernandez, graduate of a fourth-rate law school who has managed only to find work as a mailroom clerk in the United States Supreme Court. Then, one day after his shift, Gray enters the court’s parking garage, where he interrupts an assault and saves the life of Chief Justice Edgar Douglas. As a reward, Douglas makes Gray one of his law clerks, a position in which Gray will be directly involved in drafting memos and opinions on the most pressing legal issues of the day. Meanwhile, dogged FBI special agent Emma Milstein suspects that the attack on Douglas is part of a horrific series of crimes that include the murders of a defense attorney and her family, a fatal fire at a movie theater, and the killing of a convenience store clerk, all committed on the fifth of the month. Predictably, Gray decides to do his own detecting and places his life at risk. Thin characters don’t make suspending disbelief any easier. Agent: Lisa Erbach Vance, Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency.

February 15, 2017
The name says it. Grayson Hernandez. A Hispanic in the preppie world. Here it's the U.S. Supreme Court. He's a glorified mail-room boy but longs to clerk for a justice. His degree, however, is from a nowhere law school, and he's lost in the crowd of clerks with Rhodes Scholarships and Ivy League degreesuntil a lucky move gets him hired as clerk for Chief Justice Edgar Douglas. Meanwhile, the FBI is tracking a killer whose MO contains Supreme Court allusions. Then a woman, her daughter, and her mother are murdered, calling up Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' nasty observation, three generations of imbeciles is enough. You don't want to read here how the killer illustrates the separate but equal decree. And the murder scenes are graced with the court's traditional quill pen. The two plots converge when Hernandez discovers something in a colleague's computer, and detective work alternates with fights, chases, and Hernandez's life among the privileged, all ingredients of a fine thriller, and that's exactly what this one is.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)