Legal Briefs: Stories by Today's Best Thriller Writers

Rating:
Summary: Great lunch-break reading
Review: This is a great sampler for the legal-thriller reader wishing to branch out from Grisham. (Whose contribution, incidentally, is not up to par). The sincere characters, ranging from a gassy old man to a harried young father, add a welcome human dimension to the legal genre. Some stories, like "Roads," stray too far from courtroom drama to maintain interest, but there are enough page-turners to make "Legal Briefs" a worthy read.

Rating:
Summary: writer-to-writer, mystery-to-mystery, author-to-author
Review: This review based on the original hardcover - 1998... Though a few years on my shelf, reading a tome of short stories - mysteries in this case, edited by well-known author William Bernhardt - the book titled: LEGAL BRIEFS, gives the avid-reader's mind a change of pace... a slow down to the senses of deep concentration into a longer story or novel.
Advantage number two is the introduction to writers one may not necessarily "pick off the shelf". The short stories in LEGAL BRIEFS introduced me William Bernhardt himself an author (short story in book is "What We're Here For" - a delightful story with a twist and a pat on the back to the attorneys in the story for their humanity.)
Sharing the spotlight are the familiar great writers Phillip M. Margolin; Richard North Patterson; and John Grisham.
An introduction to authors Grif Stockley; Jay Brandon; Michael A. Kahn; Jeremiah Healy; Philip Friedman; and Lisa Scottoline.
My favorite short story in the LEGAL BRIEFS -- "Poetic Justice" by Steve Martini, a story which has that "zing" in the end, and a "gotcha" to the culprit.