Courting Death

A Novel

In the third Clarkeston Chronicles thriller, “Heald . . . shows his mastery of the legal mystery with characters as complex as any found in a Grisham novel” (Mark Schweizer, author of The Liturgical Mysteries).

Melanie Wilkerson and Arthur Hughes work together in a federal judge’s chambers in the small Georgia college town of Clarkeston. With vastly differing personalities, they do their best to avoid any clashes.

Melanie has returned from law school hoping to earn a solid legal reputation—and finally bury her beauty queen past. Arthur is a bright but naive Midwesterner who fell in love with Clarkeston—and is quickly falling for his attractive landlady. The cohort of federal court clerks is completed by Phil Jenkins, a Stanford graduate from San Francisco who tries his best to balance the personalities of his volatile colleagues.

But they face new levels of tension when Melanie investigates the mysterious death of a young woman in the courthouse five years earlier, and Arthur wades through the horrific habeas corpus appeals of two prisoners: an infamous serial killer and a pathetic child murderer.

Now, Melanie and Arthur must walk the fine line between law and justice—and between life and death—if they are going to make it, in this “disquieting look inside the workings of the justice system” (Publishers Weekly).