Those Empty Eyes

The legal thriller is a subgenre of crime fiction centering on the lives and work of legal professionals. Legal thrillers typically feature similar plot elements: They often feature a courtroom drama that positions a lawyer as a heroic figure. Legal thrillers sometimes focus on the lives of other legal professionals, such as judges or investigators. Because nearly all legal thrillers deal with justice systems and the process of determining what justice looks like, these stories tend to examine similar themes, such as whether a legal system can deliver truly reparative forms of justice; how society conceptualizes and copes with criminality; and whether objective “truth” really exists, as well as whose subjectivity is privileged in making this determination?

Prominent examples of contemporary legal thrillers include John Grisham’s body of work (The Firm, The Rainmaker, and The Pelican Brief, among others), Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent and The Burden of Proof, and Jilliane Hoffmann’s Retribution. In addition, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is often considered a foundational text in the modern legal thriller subgenre, since it encompasses many tropes and themes common in these stories.