The best legal novels that you can't put down

The lawyers and clerks who inhabit this book are recognizable types around any courthouse today. Bleak House is one of the best novels ever written in English, funny, cheerful, and tragic by turns. It also features the first detective character in English fiction. “The one great principle of the English law,” Dickens writes, “is to make business for itself.”

“Someone must have slandered Josef K.,” the story begins, “for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” The reader never learns who slandered K, or what he is charged with—but, over the course of a year, this respectable banker is stripped of his liberty, his dignity, and even his will. The book contains “Before the Law,” the most famous legal fable ever written, about a man who waits a lifetime at the doorway of the law—then dies without being admitted. As he dies, he learns that the doorway he has waited at was created especially for him.

This novel is in many ways the precise opposite of a “courtroom thriller.” The murder trial depicted is not upended by surprise evidence, witnesses do not blurt out confessions, and the outside world takes little notice of what is transpiring in the courtroom. But prosecutor Abner Coates is a memorable portrait of a man for whom the law has become an entire world. A powerful courtroom moment punctures Abner’s professional irony, when he imagines looking at himself through the eyes of the defendants, and he realizes that despite his good nature and intentions, to them he is a savage enemy trying to kill them.

A World War II bomber pilot returns home thoroughly determined to have no more excitement in his life. He settles down in a quiet wills-and-trusts practice. In a dusty file about an unclaimed estate, he sees that a missing heir may be living in Europe. Searching for this heir, he is pulled into Cold War politics, kidnaped, and dragged into Communist Albania, where his fate becomes an international incident. The law overtakes George in a thoroughly believable way; it is an example of why readers fear the law, which may at any moment demand that we sacrifice our comfort, our place in society, and even our very lives.

Scottoline, a former big-firm litigator, has created Benny Rosato, the founder of an all-female firm of defense lawyers, as the master of the world of courts and jails. In Mistaken Identity, however, Benny defends an unexpected client—“Alice Connoly,” who is Rosato herself, a double claiming to be a long-lost twin. What follows raises the question of why (as the mysterious defendant asks) Alice is in jail while Rosato is free, secure, and successful. In a way, Mistaken Identity is a feminist version of The Trial--a fever dream of that same hellish world that Kafka saw beneath K.’s feet--the law, supernatural and inhuman, that waits to devour the innocent and the guilty alike.