Six legal thrillers with essential social messages

Chad Zunker studied journalism at the University of Texas, where he was also on the football team. He’s worked for some of the most powerful law firms in the country and invented baby products that are now sold all over the world. He has wanted to write full time since he took his first practice hit as a skinny freshman walk-on from a 6’5, 240 pound senior All-American safety — which crushed both him and his feeble NFL dreams.

Zunker is the author of the David Adams legal thriller, An Equal Justice, as well as The Tracker, Shadow Shepherd, and Hunt the Lion in his Sam Callahan series. He lives in Austin with his wife, Katie, and their three daughters.

At CrimeReads, Zunker tagged six legal thrillers with essential social messages, including:

Havana Requiem by Paul Goldstein

Havana Requiem won the 2013 Harper Lee Prize of Fiction—can you tell I’m a big fan of that award? Goldstein’s book tells the efforts of lawyer Michael Seeley to help a group of aging Cuban jazz musicians and their families reclaim copyrights to their musical work. When his client goes missing, Seeley realizes there is a deeper conspiracy at play that begins to point not only at the Cuban secret police but also his former law firm.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue