Books by William Diehl

Martin Vail, Chicago's most brilliant lawyer, has been set up by his enemies to defend a case he cannot win. Young Aaron Stampler was caught red-handed after a murder that had the city reeling. In a desperate gamble for justice, Vail must reach deep into the recesses of a killer's mind, to flush out a monster of infinite cunning and evil.

When Linda Balfour, a young mother, is found butchered in small-town southern Illinois, a coded inscription stamped in blood on the back of her head brands her mutilated body. With his career - and his life - on the line, Vail needs answers fast before the killer signs someone else's life away.

Battling against the clock, Vail and his team work to uncover what links the crimes to the churches, the felonies to the fascists. But what begins as a high-wire act of negotiation explodes into a personal nightmare for Vail, as his most sinister adversary rears his evil head.

Young Thomas Culhane grows up in the small Californian town of Eureka. Who was this woman, where did she come from, how did she get all this money, and what was her connection to Eureka, to Thomas Culhane and to the bloody events of the 1920s that saw Culhane's political star begin to rise?