One of the most popular genres in suspense fiction is the legal thriller, so it’s hardly surprising that many of today’s top writers – John Grisham, Lisa Scottoline, David Baldacci, etc. – are also attorneys. For years, they have been steeped in statutory minutiae, trained to know the judicial traps that can trip up even the craftiest criminals as well as the legal loopholes that sometimes set the guilty free. Throw a keen imagination into the mix, an ability to turn a phrase and a penchant for prose, and you’ve got yourself a novelist. Add a sense of the twisted and you’re talking about a bestseller.
Among the cream of legal-thriller writers is Phillip Margolin, a man who has earned the right to write authoritatively of the criminal mind. Margolin worked his way through his last two years at the New York University School of Law by teaching junior high school in the South Bronx, a place which provides ample fodder for make-believe mayhem. His first job after law school was a clerkship with the chief judge of the Oregon Court of Appeals, after which he spent 24 years in private practice, specializing in criminal defense at the trial and appellate levels.
Read the entire article in the September 2000 issue
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