Tim Green has built up an enviable bibliography over the past
several years following a career as an NFL defensive end and
concurrent with the practice of law in upstate New York. ABOVE THE
LAW, his latest book, features the surprising and welcome return of
a character from a previous work, with a few new twists and some
intriguing turns.

Casey Jordan appeared in Green’s THE LETTER OF THE LAW. An
attorney with a high-powered law firm, Casey found herself
inadvertently being a party to a miscarriage of justice and set
about to balance the scales, as it were, in an ingenious if
slightly unorthodox manner. ABOVE THE LAW finds Casey in somewhat
different circumstances, having left her white-shoe firm to open a
women’s legal aid clinic funded primarily by private
contributions. Jordan undertakes the case of a pivotal client whose
circumstances will soon change everything for her.

Isadora is an illegal immigrant who faces deportation and
separation from her child, born in the United States and regarded
as an “anchor baby.” Her husband, Elijandro, was
recently killed in a hunting accident involving his employer,
Senator Chase, a prominent Texas politician who has his eye on the
Oval Office. Isadora believes that her husband was in fact murdered
by the senator, who suspected his wife of being involved with
Elijandro. Casey manages to keep mother and infant together, but as
she and her legal investigator attempt to conduct their own
investigation into Elijandro’s death, they keep running into
dead ends that are in fact cleverly constructed roadblocks: no one
wants to take Chase on.

Meanwhile, Chase is hiding much more than his deliberate murder
of Elijandro. Illegal immigrants in his employ are quietly
disappearing, taken in trucks in the dead of night to unknown
destinations. Casey, assisted by her legal investigator Jose,
begins turning over rocks that are only reluctantly dislodged as a
monstrous scheme is uncovered, an event that will have far-reaching
repercussions both north and south of the Rio Grande River.

Over the course of his last few novels, Green has been favoring
his expanding body of readers with more complex and interesting
plots. This novel is no exception. The chemistry between Casey and
Jose, both of whom are more troubled than they initially seem, is
predictable, but Green takes them and his readers through some
twists and turns, resulting in surprises that continue right up
until the conclusion of the book. From beginning to end, ABOVE THE
LAW gives more than its fair measure of money and time spent.