Who knew that being a Good Samaritan would lead Barbara Holloway to face her biggest challenge ever: being named prime suspect in a high-profile kidnapping?

Elizabeth Kurtz has taken her small son and fled her ex-husband and his mother after finding a file of explosive material incriminating the family. Although the wealthy family employs a detective agency to find her, she manages to elude them.

Defense attorney Barbara Holloway has sought seclusion in a cabin on the Oregon coast when her solitude is interrupted by a small boy who enlists her help with his unconscious mother. Once revived, the woman and her child disappear. Elizabeth Kurtz is again eluding searchers, and Barbara is accused of aiding and abetting a kidnapper. When Elizabeth finally contacts Barbara for help, Barbara finds the woman dead.

While Barbara defends Elizabeth’s housemate against murder charges, she herself is accused of obstruction of justice. Her life is put at risk as she takes on the killer.

Travis Morgan’s case seems open and shut: a plot to kill his estranged father, fundamentalist preacher Arlie Morgan, goes awry and his bullet slays an innocent bookkeeper. Two eyewitnesses seal Travis’ fate. But despite damning evidence and an admitted hatred of his father, Travis staunchly maintains his innocence.

Beseeched by his anguished mother, veteran defense attorney Barbara Holloway agrees to represent Travis. With the support of her father, attorney Frank Holloway, and crack private investigator Bailey, Barbara reveals a zealot, his ultrarich backers, and unimaginable atrocities. Travis’ case proceeds to trial, and Barbara finds herself pitted against a complacent legal system and a judge eager to simply close the case and retire. Knowing she must intervene decisively to avoid a conviction, Barbara steps squarely into the path of danger. Risking her own life, Barbara confronts the killer in order to save Travis’.

The Kelso-McIvey rehabilitation center is a place of hope and healing for both its patients and dedicated staff. For its directors, it’s a lifelong dream that’s about to be destroyed, if David McIvey has his way. A brilliant surgeon whose ego rivals his skill with a scalpel, McIvey now has controlling shares in what has always been a nonprofit clinic. His plan is to close the clinic and replace it with a massive new surgery center, with himself at the helm. Since he is poised to desecrate the dreams of so many, it’s not surprising to anyone, especially Oregon lawyer Barbara Holloway, that somebody dares to stop him—in cold blood.

When David McIvey is murdered outside the clinic’s doors early one morning, Barbara must once again use her razor-sharp instincts and take-no-prisoners attitude to create a defense for the two members of the clinic accused of his murder. In her most perplexing case yet, Barbara is forced to explore the darkest places people can hide—the soul beneath the skin.

Controversial author and scholar David Etheridge is not the kind of company an aspiring politician wants to keep. But ambitious senator Robert McCrutchen has a history with Etheridge that he’s desperately trying to keep under wraps. Twenty-two years ago, both men were investigated in the death of a young coed, but the case was never solved.

When Etheridge returns to Eugene, Oregon, McCrutchen is his grudging host—until the senator is found shot dead. Now, Etheridge is once again suspected of murder, only this time, with the cold case reopened, he’s facing a double charge. Attorney Barbara Holloway must battle both the prosecution and the court of public opinion, which has already tried and convicted Etheridge for both murders. As the pressure mounts, Barbara ties the past and present together, risking her own life to preserve justice.

In Kate Wilhelm’s latest crime novel, a small Oregon town is rocked by a wheels-within-wheels case of art, fraud, and murder.

Silver Bay, Oregon, a small coastal resort town of under a thousand residents, is home to three generations of women: Marnie, the long-widowed owner of a small gift shop; Van, her granddaughter who is about to graduate from medical school; and Stef, mercurial and difficult, a brilliant artist who refuses to sell her work. When Stef discovers that Dale Oliver—the latest husband/paramour in a very long line—is trying to sell her work behind her back, she puts a stop to it and threatens to do the same to him. Shortly thereafter, Stef dies in an accident in her studio, and Dale shows up with a signed contract granting him the right to sell her work. Convinced that Stef was murdered to steal her artwork, Marnie and Van, grandmother and granddaughter, decide to do whatever is necessary to see that Dale doesn’t get away with any of it. This includes enlisting the help of the new stranger in town, Tony, a former New York City cop who might be the only one who can prove it was murder and bring the killer to justice.

Five years ago, Barbara Holloway gave up practicing law, disillusioned with a profession that put politics before justice. Then she receives a phone call, with a simple message: “I need you.”

Nell Kendricks’ husband disappeared seven years earlier, abandoning his young family. Nell hasn’t seen him since—until the day he arrives at the edge of her property and is shot, instantly killed. Accused of his murder, Nell turns to lawyer Frank Holloway for help. Frank knows he cannot win the case alone and calls upon his daughter, Barbara.

Barbara is determined to stay distanced from the case, but the more she learns, the more questions she finds herself asking. Is Nell innocent, as Frank attests? Where has Lucas Kendricks been for the past seven years? Despite her vow, Barbara finds herself drawn to the case and reclaims the search for truth that first led her to the law.

In her three previous appearances, attorney Barbara Holloway has taken on the sort of cases no one else wants, all hopeless messes. With the help of her father, Frank, she has pulled through each time. But even from the start, this new case is different.

Mitch Arno always meant bad news for the coastal town of Folsum, Oregon. When they ran him out of town seventeen years ago, he left behind a wife with two daughters and a family that never wanted to see him again. When he returns, he brings trouble in the form of a lot of suspicious money. As Barbara attempts to counsel Mitch’s wife about the money, a second form of trouble arrives: a corpse—Mitch’s. And now Barbara is in a morass of conflicting interests, and the only way out could lead her straight into the arms of the devil.

Defense for the Devil is another page-turning delight from the queen of courtroom drama.

Trial lawyer Barbara Holloway has a reputation for taking on the toughest cases and winning them. But this time it looks as though she’s up against an unbeatable opponent—the lawyer who taught her everything she knows.

The trial involves the murder of Gus Marchand, a hard-working, God-fearing man who is found dead on his kitchen floor. The locals cast their suspicions toward Alex Feldman, Marchand’s hideously deformed neighbor, without any real evidence linking him to the crime. At the request of a fellow attorney, Barbara agrees to defend him.

The other suspect is the high school principal, Hilde Franz, who’d had an argument with the dead man earlier that week. But Hilde also happens to be an old friend of Barbara’s father, Frank, who has agreed to defend him in court. For the first time in her career, Barbara cannot turn to her father for advice. Quite the contrary: she has to stay one step ahead of him if she’s to have any hope of saving her client. Because she knows only too well what kind of legal mind she’s up against.

Barbara Holloway is a low-key attorney in Eugene, Oregon, who left her father’s high-powered firm to handle small legal problems for local residents and ponder her next move. But while trying to sort out her own future, two people, desperate for help, show up on her doorstep: former pro football player Martin Owens and his wife, Binnie. Binnie, who is mute, met her husband when she sneaked aboard his boat while it was docked in Haiti and smuggled herself into the US. Now Immigration is seeking to deport her back to Haiti, which would be a death sentence. Born to a woman from Belize who was kidnapped and enslaved by pirates, Binnie’s only hope is to prove her and her mother’s real identity. With only days to find the truth and protect Binnie, Holloway sets off for Belize. But what she knows is only the tip of the iceberg in what turns out to be one of her most complex, compelling, and dangerous cases yet.

Stanley Huysman, a Nobel Prize–winning scientist, had spent his later years on far-out experiments never much heeded by the scientific community. Only after Huysman’s death does his visionary genius become clear, when his widow, Irma, arranges for Drew Lancaster to write the scientist’s biography. As Drew delves into Huysman’s notes, he discovers not only that the great scientist had actually been able to induce telepathy in his subjects by genetic manipulation, but also that Huysman’s assistant, Clyde Dohemy, has unscrupulously taken over the project in hopes of lucrative funding.

When Drew recruits his ex-wife, Irma, and a group of young people who knew about Huysman’s experiments to set a trap for Dohemy, they are drawn into a web of secrets involving Senate files, counterfeit money, gambling casinos, and the Secret Service.

Sam and Lori had only just met and now they are dead, the result of a car accident. Accident? No. Dead? Not exactly. In life, Sam was a successful playwright, Lori a secretary for Ben Carnahan, a scheming movie producer who wants Sam’s new script and whose negligence on a movie set twenty years earlier killed Lori’s father. Now Sam and Lori are ghosts out of sequence with the real world yet fully aware of their existence. As they work together to find out what happened to them, a plot to murder Ben is revealed. As ghosts, how can they possibly stop this conspiracy? They can’t contact the living, for rules are rules–in life and in death and even when you’re in between.

From 1966 to 1980, Damon Knight created the Orbit series of anthologies, representing the finest writing in the science fiction genre. Nineteen of Kate Wilhelm’s stories were included in this series of twenty-one volumes. Among these are “Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang,” an exploration of infertility and cloning in the aftermath of global environmental collapse. It won the Locus, Jupiter, and Hugo awards for Best Novel in 1977. “The Planners” reaches into the moral conflicts of a primate researcher and won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1968. Other stories include a road trip into a woman’s psyche; primal fears through the eyes of a wise and empathetic alien; an encounter in a bus depot during a raging winter storm; and the first “interactive” reality TV show. Ms. Wilhelm’s stories are prophetic yet as recognizable as a story in this morning’s paper.

Forget about Grisham, Turow, and all those other scribbling ex-lawyers. The best writer of legal mysteries working today is Kate Wilhelm of Eugene, Oregon.

When he was a kid, Teddy Wendover had an accident that left him stunted at the mental age of eight. Physically, he’s six-foot-two and twenty-eight years old, but he acts and thinks just like a little boy. Could this big little boy be a killer?

Someone has murdered one of Oregon’s congressmen, and it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that this politician led the field trip during which Teddy’s accident occurred almost twenty years ago. Nor does it seem to be coincidental that the killer left rocks strewn about the murder site, rocks just like the ones Teddy plays with. And the only thing that’s certain is that the person who cast the first of these stones is not without sin.

Malice Prepense is the most complicated and most engrossing case yet for Barbara Holloway, the dynamic star of Death Qualified and The Best Defense.

Chaos has descended on the Valducci family. Gina Valducci’s grandmother, mentor, and founder of the family’s thriving nursery business, has died. Her death sets off a string of seemingly unrelated events, including two horrific murders. Gina’s colleague Jeff stands out as an obvious suspect, with plenty of motivation, opportunity, and means.

In her most unusual and complex case yet, Barbara Holloway accepts Jeff as her reluctant client. But to defend him, she must first discover how a secret will, corporate greed, stolen art of the World War II era, family skeletons, attempted murder, and an old ornate mirror factor in to the case. Barbara must reassemble the puzzle pieces perfectly, before it’s too late.

Lara and Vinny Jessup had a lovely May-December marriage. It renewed his lease on life after a battle with cancer, and it rescued her from a bad first marriage. And thenVinny was found dead. Initially, the sheriff in Loomis County thinks that Vinny died when his car rolled over on a bad curve on Lookout Mountain. But then he finds a gunshot wound. Was it suicide, or was it murder? With a large insurance policy as her motive, Lara could have staged the death … or so it appears to the sheriff.

Barbara Holloway is a trial lawyer who tends to take on difficult cases, but in every previous case she has had some fragment with which she could build an argument. She finds herself drawn to the Oregon desert to take on this case, accompanied by her associates: her colleague Shelley with her Barbie-doll looks, the inimitable detective Bailey Novell, and her father Frank. But the case itself is as dead as the desert. Is there any defense at all?

Compelling and distinctive, this drama demonstrates anew why Kate Wilhelm is considered a master of the form.

Constance Leidl and Charlie Meiklejohn are an unlikely pair of detectives. He is a former arson detective; she is a psychologist. Together, the husband-and-wife team has a knack for unraveling a mystery. Seven Kinds of Death is a famous sculpture, but the name takes on new meaning when bodies start turning up at the creator’s art colony.

A party launching the art tour of an old friend and the opening of her husband’s condominiums turns tragic when the sculptures are vandalized and one of the guests, a highly regarded art-magazine editor, is found strangled in one of the new condos. Charlie and Constance interview some of the guests and learn there has already been another death at the condo site, viewed at the time as an accident. Connecting the two deaths leads the two sleuths to an unexpected suspect.

Lee Donne has an eidetic memory that maintains a visual representation of everything she’s ever seen. Unfortunately, this gift hasn’t helped her in college, where she spent four years drifting from major to major. With no degree or job prospects, Lee is relieved to be house-sitting her grandfather’s isolated Oregon home. But her stay soon becomes a nightmare when she is tormented by strange and menacing noises at night.

Determined to track down the haunting sounds, Lee finds their source: a young man who is accidentally killed during the course of her investigation. The man knew that Lee’s grandfather would be away. But what was he looking for? Searching for answers, Lee discovers an envelope full of old photographs—men in white hooded robes, her grandmother, a man hanging from a tree. Was her family connected to the Ku Klux Klan?

When a seemingly simple case turns complicated, respected attorney Barbara Holloway must rethink her game plan.

Gregarious Las Vegas entertainer and ex-con Wally Lederer claims he’s turned his life around, but when Jay Wilkins, a childhood friend, accuses Wally of stealing a valuable artifact, it’s up to Barbara to ferret out the truth. Wally swears he’s innocent. But when Wilkins is murdered and the police name Wally as their prime suspect, Barbara knows he is in serious trouble.

As Barbara begins to dig up the dirt, she is shocked to learn that Jay’s wife is now missing and that Jay himself is far from being the upstanding businessman he claimed to be. Before long, new evidence points toward an unlikely killer. However, the truth that would protect her client could jeopardize another life she means to save.

The route to justice is paved with nothing but lies, and Barbara must make a judgment call that leaves her with no option.

Kate Wilhelm returns to the marvelous milieu of Death Qualified with this page-turning legal thriller.

The neighborhood in Eugene, Oregon, is blue-collar; the cafe holds only three tables and four booths. But it’s the only place attorney Barbara Holloway feels both productive and peaceful. Laptop computer on the table, coffee refilled regularly by the cook, Barbara gets her work done and wants for nothing more—certainly not another explosive, emotionally devastating courtroom case.

Then a woman comes to Barbara with a case she cannot refuse. The sister of “Baby Killer” Kennerman tells a tale so terrifying that Barbara must act, even if she does so reluctantly. What she unearths is a corrupt conspiracy, complete with incompetent lawyers, that will allow a killer to go free. The deeper she delves, the more atrocities she finds. When she finds herself up against a smear campaign of unimaginable proportions, Barbara Holloway realizes that even the best defense may not be enough.

Private investigator Charlie Meiklejohn is called in by insurance companies to follow the trail of a suspected serial arsonist. The arsonist, Carson Danvers, has been on a fanatical crusade since the loss of his wife and son, burning down a series of old, shut-up wooden buildings in which random outbreaks of madness and murder have been occurring. Meiklejohn, with the help of his wife Constance, begins following the criminal trail, but finds himself teaming up with his quarry to face the source of these strange outbreaks: a malfunctioning alien space probe.

Considered “one of the masters of psychological fiction in America” (San Francisco Chronicle), Kate Wilhelm sews up an irresistibly chilling puzzle that will keep listeners captivated until the very end.

When Jud Connors, a successful writer, is found murdered in his isolated cabin in the Oregon woods, his daughter Abby sees her world start to fall apart. Who could have wanted her father dead? And why? More puzzling is how anyone could have gotten to the cabin undetected. Was the murderer someone Jud knew?

As Abby embarks on her own investigation, she soon realizes that the clue to the murderer’s identity is buried in her father’s latest novel, finished just weeks before his death. But will she be able to see through the fiction before the killer comes after her?

Hiram Granville, a modern Leonardo, secured more than a thousand patents during his lifetime, often just ahead of others who had already been working the same ideas. His son John, an economics genius, never lost a cent in the stock market–or any other financial deal–and was investigated for insider trading on more than one occasion. Now Cat, a documentarian; her researcher, Mercy; and Cracker Jack, an electronics whiz, are doing a film about the Granville clan. What they find as they research the family is madness, suicide, a seemingly total seclusion, and a frightening glimpse about what it means to peer into the future.

It started with a promise, a pact. It became a secret that no one must tell: that their parents were dead and gone, including the one they’d buried in the backyard.

When they move to a new home in Oregon, the McNair family knows they’re where they belong. But when tragedy strikes the family, the children face the prospect of being separated by the state. Rather than being sent to different foster homes, the four children decide to lie. And it’s a big lie. The sort of deceit that can hold a family together or tear it apart.

Now the McNair children are growing older, discovering love, college, and careers. But their lie haunts them. Their home holds them captive. Only the horrifying truth of their mother’s death can set the children free. And only the truth can destroy them all.

Disappearances. Murder. The price of silence in a small town.

In dire need of a job, Todd Fielding accepts the offer to work at The Brindle Times–even if she has to move to the lackluster town of Brindle, Oregon. As she settles into her new home, Todd is fully prepared to adapt to the boredom of small-town life, but her preconceptions of Brindle are completely shattered when a local girl disappears. Even more shocking to Todd is the town’s sheer indifference to the incident. No one–not even the police–appear particularly concerned.

When Todd looks deeper into the story, she discovers that five other girls have “run away” from Brindle under strange circumstances over the past twenty years, and no one seems interested in finding them. As she sets out to uncover the history of a town that has cloaked itself in secrecy for far too long, evidence of manipulation and cold-blooded murder begin to arise–and Todd may be the next victim to pay the deadly price of silence.

When a well-bred client hands Barbara Holloway a large retainer and asks for complete anonymity, the Oregon attorney is both intrigued and suspicious. The woman, a respected music professor and member of a group that sponsors worthy causes involving women, wants Barbara to defend Carol Fredricks, a gifted young pianist who stands accused of murdering the manager of a piano bar.

Not long ago, Barbara heard Carol play, and that is enough to convince her to take the case. But now the questions are coming faster than the answers. And how can Barbara explain the oddly incomplete picture she gets of the young woman herself? Soon Barbara is convinced that her client is not only innocent but being framed by ruthless foes who will stop at nothing to keep the past buried. However, proving the case and keeping her client safe will require every drop of Barbara’s notoriously fierce determination to get at the truth, an unbidden truth that may just damn them both.

What would happen to the precarious balance of power if scientists could extend life for centuries? If one power bloc had biological protection against radiation and the other did not? Whose thumb would press the button first?

When Lyle Taney took leave from her teaching job to live high in the mountains, researching the ways of eagles, she was just planning to write her next book. Lasater was an unscrupulous, skilled operative who thought he could maneuver her as he pleased. He believed women were incapable of making ethical or moral decisions—and he was wrong. When the obscure government agent from an anonymous department tried to force Lyle to spy on her mysterious neighbors, she resisted. But the first step had been taken, involving her in a life-and-death struggle.

When the first warm breeze of Doomsday came wafting over the Shenandoah Valley, the Sumners were ready. Using their enormous wealth, the family had forged an isolated post-holocaust citadel. Their descendants would have everything they needed to raise food and do the scientific research necessary for survival. But the family was soon plagued by sterility, and the creation of clones offered the only answer. And that final pocket of human civilization lost the very human spirit it was meant to preserve as man and mannequin turned on one another.

Sweeping, dramatic, rich with humanity, and rigorous in its science,Where Late the Sweet Birds Sangis widely regarded as a high point of both humanistic and hard science fiction. It won science fiction’s Hugo Award and Locus Award on its first publication and is as compelling today as it was then.

Charlie didn’t want to take this case–he hated cases involving crazy wills–but when one of the new clients mentioned that the Bainbridge men are cursed, he knew resistance was hopeless: Constance could not resist confronting a curse.

In a quiet college town in New Jersey, five million dollars in cashier’s checks lies hidden in a dead man’s house, and whoever finds the checks gets to keep it all. Four family members have four weeks before the house and its contents become the property of a small college. Soon two deaths by drowning from the past and another clear case of murder in the present complicate matters. It takes the combined skills of a superbly trained homicide detective, Charlie, and an equally well trained psychologist, Constance, to unravel the mystery of the Bainbridge curse–and expose a killer.