Orem Library

Convicted murderer Melvin Mars is counting down the last hours before his execution -- for the violent killing of his parents twenty years earlier -- when he's granted an unexpected reprieve. Another man has confessed to the crime. Amos Decker, newly hired on an FBI special task force, takes an interest in Mars's case after discovering the striking similarities to his own life: Both men were talented football players with promising careers cut short...

A Lesson Before Dying, is set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shoot out in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and...

A career lawman will bear witness to the final judgement, as a man he put away twenty years ago is about to be executed for the brutal slaying of two hikers. However, his conscience is no longer clear to the point of absolute certainty about the man's guilt. Also of intense interest to the lawman is the parallel between the current events and a legendary murder and execution over 100 years old -- the story of a great injustice, and a woman condemned...

In Mississippi, a young lawyer races against time to save his grandfather from the gas chamber. The grandfather was tried three times for a Ku Klux Klan bombing which killed two civil rights workers in 1967. He was found innocent twice, but guilty the third time. By the author of A Time To Kill.

"Hannah has abandoned everything-her trajectory as a law student, her childhood home and caring for her ill mother-for the chance to work with the Innocence Project, a prestigious coalition of investigators who fight to free wrongly convicted prisoners. Hannah's ambitions are set on the program's highest-stakes case in years: a convicted rapist and murderer on death row. She'll do anything-whatever it takes-to work on this case. Because Hannah has...

Welcome to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, home to the Depression-worn men of E Block. Convicted killers all, each awaits his turn to walk the Green Mile, keeping a date with "Old Sparky," Cold Mountain's electric chair. Prison Guard Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities in his years working the Mile. But he's never seen anyone like John Coffey, a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a child, condemned for a crime terrifying in its violence...

"Homecoming" takes us back to Ford County, the fictional setting of many of John Grisham's unforgettable stories. Jake Brigance is back, but he's not in the courtroom. He's called upon to help an old friend, Mack Stafford, a former lawyer in Clanton, who three years earlier became a local legend when he stole money from his clients, divorced his wife, filed for bankruptcy, and left his family in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again--until...

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities...

An unforgettable and unpredictable debut novel of guilt, punishment, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. Noa P. Singleton never spoke a word in her own defense throughout a brief trial that ended with a jury finding her guilty of first-degree murder. Ten years later, having accepted her fate, she sits on death row in a maximum-security penitentiary, just six months away from her execution date. Seemingly out of the blue, she is visited by...

This suspenseful novel is about a vicious triple murder and the man condemned to die for it. Complicating the situation is that the judge who originally found the man guilty is only recently out of prison herself, having served time for taking bribes.