MICHAEL AVERY
Writer
MURDER IN BLUE
Michael Avery is thrilled to debut Murder in Blue, a sequel to his first Boston crime novel, The Cooperating Witness.
Susan Sorella’s client, furious about calls against the Red Sox, screams “Kill the Ump!” in a bar. The man in blue shows up dead later that night. Cops find the murder weapon in the client’s garage. It looks like Murder One is a sure thing—life in prison with no chance of parole. To make things worse, Susan starts falling for the homicide detective in charge of the case, saddling her with an ethical dilemma. He’s the best-looking cop she’s ever seen and witty as hell.
Bodies pile up while Susan follows a dangerous trail through the streets of Boston and along the beaches of Tampa Bay, hunting for someone else who might have pulled the trigger. She needs help from her former ally mob boss Frank Romano, but he’s worried about his oath of secrecy to his criminal cohorts. The trial’s about to start and Susan still doesn’t have a suspect to offer to the jury.
Click the cover image to the right to read a sample and use the links below to purchase the book.
A BIT ABOUT ME
Michael Avery is a freelance writer who lives in Albuquerque. He writes nonfiction about law and politics. He produces fiction on a broader canvass and is interested in the problems of contemporary America. Murder in Blue is the second book in the Susan Sorella Mystery Series. The Cooperating Witness was the first.
Beginning in 1970, Michael enjoyed a career as a civil rights and criminal defense attorney over four decades, representing clients in jury trials and arguing cases in federal and state appellate courts, including the United States Supreme Court. His principal specialty was law enforcement misconduct. Michael and a team of lawyers obtained the largest award ever against the FBI for wrongful convictions, securing damages of $102 million for the families of four innocent men who were framed on murder charges by the Bureau. In 1998, he joined the faculty of Suffolk Law School in Boston, where he was a tenured professor, teaching Constitutional Law, Evidence, and related courses. In 2014 Suffolk awarded him the status of professor emeritus.
Michael graduated from Yale College in 1966 and Yale Law School in 1970. In 1968-1969, he was an exchange student at the University of Moscow. He returned to school and received an M.F.A. from Bennington College in January 2017.
He was the editor and a contributing author to We Dissent: Talking Back to the Rehnquist Court (NYU Press), a critical review of civil liberties and civil rights cases from the Rehnquist Court, and co-author of The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals (Vanderbilt U. Press). Prof. Avery is co-author of Police Misconduct: Law and Litigation (West), a leading treatise on civil rights law, co-author of the Handbook of Massachusetts Evidence (Aspen), the leading treatise on that subject, and the author of the Glannon Guide to Evidence (Aspen), as well as several law review articles.
Michael has been politically active since the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement of the sixties and seventies. From 2003-2006 he served as president of the National Lawyers Guild. He is one of the founders of the National Police Accountability Project, was its first president, and returned as president again in 2019-2020.
Follow him on Twitter: @profavery1