Sunday, December 18, 2016

Five books that changed Reece Hirsch's life

Reece Hirsch is the Thriller Award-nominated author of four thrillers that draw upon his background as a privacy attorney, the latest of which is Surveillance.

One of five books that changed Hirsch's life, as shared at Crimespree Magazine:
Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow.

Turow’s groundbreaking legal thriller was published the summer before I entered law school at U.S.C. Although I didn’t start writing in earnest for several more years, it made writing a novel seem a little more possible. Presumed Innocent is still for me the gold standard in legal thrillers and a classic example of storytelling misdirection, hiding the killer in plain sight. As I labored over my first novel, the legal thriller THE INSIDER, I often had Turow in mind. For one thing, we were partners in the same law firm during much of the writing of that book. For another, Turow is said to have written Presumed Innocent while riding the train to work as a U.S. Attorney. I do much of my writing on the BART train heading in to San Francisco to my law firm job. Turow got off his train after Presumed Innocent, but I’m still very much on it.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Presumed Innocent is among Fiona Barton's ten favorite books centering on marriages that hold dark secrets and Alafair Burke's favorite "Lawyers are People Too" books. Sandy Stern in Presumed Innocent is one of Simon Lelic's top ten lawyers in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue