MICHAEL AVERY
Writer
MURDER IN BLUE
Mama's Boy is the third installment of the Susan Sorella Boston crime novels, joining The Cooperating Witness and Murder in Blue in the series.
Defense attorney Susan Sorella faces a seemingly hopeless case. Her young client William Jackson stands accused of the brutal murder of his father. The evidence appears damning: the cops found him standing over the body, shotgun in hand, moments after the murder. Charged as an adult, if convicted he’ll spend a lifetime in prison with no chance of parole.
Undeterred by the bleak odds, Susan pursues a relentless investigation, engaging the aid of Frank Romano, Boston’s formidable mob boss. But William’s case is far from straightforward. As Susan delves deeper, she uncovers a web of spousal abuse, infidelity, identity theft, and is forced to question the very legitimacy of a mother’s love for her son.
The intrepid lawyer’s dogged determination to save her client puts her life and her law license on the line. In a race against time, she is compelled to navigate a labyrinth of lies and deceit to uncover the truth…​
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.
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Follow him on Twitter: @profavery1