MICHAEL AVERY
Writer
THE COOPERATING WITNESS
Michael Avery is thrilled to debut his newest book, a Boston crime novel titled The Cooperating Witness.
Synopsis: Suffolk Law student Susan Sorella is tending tables at her father’s restaurant in Boston’s North End when the head of the local mob pays her a surprise visit. What he tells her sends her on a mission to save an innocent man accused of gunning down the mob’s accountant.
Susan’s an intern for Bobby Coughlin, a burned-out defense attorney who cops his clients out faster than they can sign his retainer agreement. The judge, having dropped the accused trigger man in Bobby’s lap, is pushing for a quick guilty plea. Bobby wants to supply it before he has a nervous breakdown.
Susan has to battle Bobby’s fear of failure, his sexism, the State’s Attorney, crooked FBI agents, their homicidal informants, and a cooperating witness to get to the truth. She’s not a lawyer yet, but with her knack for digging up evidence and the wise guys on her side, she’s racing to get to the truth before an innocent man goes to jail.
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.
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