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Author Jeffrey S. Stephens

A Russell Palmer Novel • Jeffrey S. Stephens

THE SECOND MAN

A killer invented an accomplice. Now an innocent man has to prove a ghost was never there.

Caleb Lawson was walking home at three in the morning wearing a hoodie. That was enough. An hour later he was in a lineup for a killing he knew nothing about.

The man who pulled the trigger has a story: there was a second man on that street, and he ran off with the gun. The only witness says there was no one else there at all. Between those two accounts stands a young man with no alibi, no priors, and a father on the force who has not spoken to him in years.

Russell Palmer takes the case. His investigator Robbie Whyte works the street. And New York — a mayor counting votes, an organiser counting crowds, a press corps counting clicks — decides what happened before either of them can find out.

What this book gives you is the thing courtroom fiction rarely does: a case where the truth is not hidden but absent, and where proving nothing happened is harder than proving something did. It is written by a lawyer who has spent forty years in the rooms where these fights are actually had — and it reads like it.

If you read Grisham, Turow or Connelly, this belongs on the same shelf.

The Second Man is the second Russell Palmer novel, following Illusions of Trust.