Bum Rap

Miami has a way of turning even the most routine cases into something dangerous, and in Bum Rap, Jake Lassiter walks straight into the middle of one. When a fellow attorney is charged with murder and the only witness who can clear him has vanished into the city's shadowy underworld, Lassiter finds himself racing against the Russian mob, a hostile federal investigation, and a clock that keeps running out. The stakes are personal, the danger is real, and the question of who's actually guilty keeps shifting in ways that make it impossible to stop turning pages.

Paul Levine writes Miami like someone who knows exactly where the bodies are buried—figuratively and otherwise. His prose is sharp and propulsive, laced with dark humor that keeps the tension from becoming suffocating. Jake Lassiter is a rare protagonist: a man worn down by the legal system who still can't quite bring himself to stop fighting it. The pacing is tight, the courtroom knowledge is genuine, and the whole thing has the lived-in authenticity of a city that's always one bad deal away from chaos.