![]() That’s exactly what’s on trial.” – Cheater’s Game Cross-examining an admissions officer, Lassiter asks what’s the difference between bribing the university with a huge donation for a building or bribing a coach? The prosecutor objects: “The admissions system isn’t on trial here.” And Lassiter shoots back: “Sure it is. Cheating your way into college may be immoral but isn’t a crime. * Defending his savant nephew who’s part of a bribery scheme to get lackadaisical students admitted to prestigious universities, Lassiter offers a unique defense. Did he suffer one too many concussions playing football? – Bum Luck * “Thirty seconds after the jury announced its verdict, I decided to kill my client.” Why? After clearing a guilty client, Lassiter becomes unhinged. ![]() * Plagued with guilt, Jake retraces the steps of a model who went missing 18 years earlier…after their one-night stand. *Lassiter is charged with killing his girlfriend and banker who was about to report him to the authorities for allegedly stealing from clients. Lassiter is sleeping with Gina Florio and defending her mob-connected husband in court. With those character notes, we can expect his actions – and the books’ plots – to be unconventional. Lassiter, if you persist in this line of questioning, I’ll send you to a place you’ve never been.” He routinely carries a toothbrush to court in case he’s held in contempt. He ponders the sign that hangs over the bench in Miami courtrooms: “We Who Labor Here Seek Only the Truth.” Lassiter thinks there ought to be a footnote: “Subject to the truth being ignored by lying witnesses, obfuscated by sleazy lawyers, excluded by inept judged, and overlooked by sleeping jurors.” The linebacker-turned-lawyer has developed a healthy cynicism of the justice system. He’s a tough guy in a suit who proudly graduated “in the top half of the bottom third of my night law school class.” And that night school diploma? It hangs over a crack in the plaster above his toilet. “There I stood, 230 pounds of ex-football player, ex-public defender, ex-a-lot-of-things, leaning against the rail of the witness stand, home to a million sweaty palms.” Here’s Jake’s internal dialogue early in To Speak for the Dead, the first book of the series: In my “Jake Lassiter” legal thrillers, readers learn the protagonist’s backstory – a prime building block of character – from what he says and does…and thinks. In crime fiction, I’d add this note: Character determines plot. ![]() Hero? Villain? Combination of the two? We choose our own path in life. Roughly 2,500 years before Travis McGee mixed the first martini aboard his houseboat and Jake Lassiter cracked wise in a Miami courtroom, Heraclitus wrote, “Character is destiny.” The old Greek philosopher meant that we are not controlled by a predetermined fate. “I never intended to become a hero, and I succeeded.” – Travis McGee in Cinnamon Skin by John D. “There are no one hundred percent heroes.”
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