From Courtrooms to Fiction

For more than two decades, I have spent much of my professional life inside criminal courtrooms. That experience teaches you a few things. One of them is that cases rarely look as simple from the inside as they do from the outside.

A police report may summarize an event in a few paragraphs. An indictment may reduce months or years of activity to numbered counts on several sheets of paper. A courtroom hearing may last only an hour. Behind those documents are people, decisions, mistakes, assumptions and competing versions of what actually happened.

That world helped shape Slip 47. But the novel is not a disguised version of one of my cases. It is fiction. What came from the courtroom was something more fundamental: a way of looking at stories.

The Small Detail

Trial lawyers learn quickly that important cases can sometimes turn on very small things: a time, a photograph, a sentence buried in a report, a name that appears where it should not, a document routed to the wrong office, or a piece of evidence everyone has looked at but no one has really seen.

Most of those details ultimately mean nothing. Occasionally, one changes everything. That idea fascinated me as a novelist. What happens when a lawyer notices something everyone else has overlooked? And what happens when he keeps asking about it after people would prefer that he stop? That became one of the starting points for Dean Mercet.

Creating Dean Mercet

Dean is not me. He is a fictional character with his own history, relationships, strengths and mistakes. But I wanted him to think like a lawyer who has spent years dealing with criminal cases.

That means he does not automatically accept the first explanation he is given by his own client or the prosecutor. He understands that documents can be technically accurate and still incomplete. He knows that people tell the truth selectively. And he knows that institutions develop habits—some good, some bad, and some simply because they have been repeated for so long that no one remembers why they began. Those ideas became increasingly important as Slip 47 developed.

The Courtroom Is Only the Beginning

Legal thrillers are often associated with dramatic trials, surprise witnesses and last-minute courtroom revelations. There are courtroom scenes in Slip 47, and the law matters throughout the novel. But I wanted the story to extend beyond the courtroom. Real legal work often does.

A case can lead into police records, old files, businesses, families, financial records, government offices and conversations that happen far from a judge or jury. For Dean, one question leads to another. Then another. Eventually, the case he thinks he understands becomes something much larger. That progression—from something ordinary to something unsettling—is one of my favorite things about the thriller genre.

Familiar Ground, Different Rules

Writing fiction has also reminded me how different storytelling is from practicing law.

In court, the goal is clarity. You want the judge or jury to understand exactly what matters and why. A novel works differently.

Sometimes the reader should know less. Sometimes the unanswered question is the most important part of the scene. Sometimes what a character chooses not to say matters more than what appears on the page. Learning that difference has been one of the most enjoyable parts of writing Slip 47.

The courtroom gave me the world.

Fiction gave me permission to ask: What if the case was only the beginning?

Slip 47 — A Dean Mercet Thriller arrives October 22, 2026.