Books like A Time to Kill

01

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Bryan Stevenson · Memoir

Bryan Stevenson's memoir of his career as a capital defense attorney in Alabama, and specifically of his years working on the case of Walter McMillian — a Black man wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Monroe County, Alabama — is simultaneously a riveting legal narrative and a sustained moral argument about the American criminal justice system's treatment of the poor and of Black defendants.

02

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Michelle Alexander · Politics

Michelle Alexander's central argument is stark: the United States has not ended racial caste, it has merely redesigned it.

03

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote · Memoir

Truman Capote's account of the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas — and of the investigation, capture, trial, and execution of the killers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock — is the founding document of the true crime genre and one of the most admired works of American nonfiction of the twentieth century.

04

The Firm

John Grisham · Thriller

Mitch McDeere is a Harvard Law graduate who accepts a job at a small, lavishly compensating Memphis firm called Bendini, Lambert & Locke.

05

The Pelican Brief

John Grisham · Thriller

Two Supreme Court justices are assassinated in a single night.

06

Along Came a Spider

James Patterson · Thriller

Along Came a Spider introduces Alex Cross, a Black homicide detective and forensic psychologist working in Washington D.C., in the case that made James Patterson a bestseller.