William Deverell

Is someone systematically killing the judges of the B.C. bar? At least one has been, murdered and several have disappeared. Arthur Beauchamp returns from retirement once again to take on the case, this time defending his former nemesis, backwoods poet Cudworth Brown, and tracking down a mystery novel that Brown's unreliable former lawyer has been, writing, all this just as his own wife, Margaret, has announced her candidacy for the Green Party in...

Arthur Beauchamp takes a break from the courtroom to write a memoir so he can set the record straight about a headline murder case he fought as a young lawyer in 1966. The trial would either mark him as a pathetic loser or thrust him into the top ranks of criminal counsel. The background: in 1966, a young housemaid was raped by her employer, a callous and vindictive millionaire. She shot him point blank, so it seemed an open-and-shut case of first-degree...

Award—winning novelist William Deverell is back with a new Arthur Beauchamp legal thriller. Lawyer Arthur Beauchamp is facing the most explosive trial of his career: the defence of seven boisterous environmentalists accused of sabotaging an Ontario plant that pumps out a pesticide that has led to the mass death of honeybees. The story zigzags between Toronto, where the trial takes place, and Arthur's West Coast island home, where he finds himself...

The toughest case of Beauchamp's brilliant career features sex, slander, and dirty politics Montreal journalist Lou Sabatino, under witness protection after nearly being gunned down by the Mafia, is sucked into the quirky world of a conniving Russian dominatrix who has secretly recorded herself putting the whip to the bare bottom of a high-ranking federal cabinet minister. It's the scoop of the century, but too hot a potato - if Lou breaks the story,...

Twenty members of a cult are found massacred on an isolated island on Canada's West Coast. Their leader, Shiva Ram Acharya, is brought to trial, and the great Arthur Beauchamp defends him, assisted by his junior counsel Max Macarthur. Shiva claims to have amnesia and refuses to participate in his own defense. But Macarthur gradually becomes convinced of his innocence, embarking on the greatest challenge of his career - a dangerous quest for the true...

A new edition of the Arthur Ellis Award winning crime novel Arthur Beauchamp, the scholarly, self-doubting legend of the B.C. criminal bar, is enjoying his retirement on B.C.'s Garibaldi Island when he is dragged back to court to defend an old client. Nick "The Owl" Faloon, one of the world's top jewel thieves, has been accused of raping and murdering a psychologist. Beauchamp has scarcely registered how unlikely it is that the rascally Faloon could...

A Toronto lawyer defends a hit man as the Midnight Strangler stalks the city in a legal thriller based on the author's popular CBC drama Street Legal. Toronto, 1980. Three ambitious young lawyers are out to make a name for themselves with their own practice. Chuck Tchobanian and Leon Robinovitch are testing the boundaries of free speech with a pair of controversial cases. Carrie Barr, fresh from her success defending a drifter charged as the notorious...

Arthur P. Besterman, criminal lawyer and reformed alcoholic, was the first to go. Counsel to Vancouver's assorted shifters and grifters, Besterman almost always lost his cases. But a recent victory defending a low-life client might be a clue as to why he was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. Then someone takes a pot shot at philandering lawyer Brian Pomeroy after he successfully defends a group of controversial eco-terrorists. All of a sudden...

Originally published in 2002 and nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel A blend of thriller, satire, and romance with a shocking twist Romance novelist Maggie Schneider flees snowy Canada for Costa Rica, seeking inspiration … and maybe even a romantic encounter. She finds far more than she expected when she's kidnapped by a rag-tag gang led by a handsome, charismatic revolutionary called Halcon: the Falcon. Also held hostage...

A psychological time bomb is triggered in Kellen O'Reilly as he begins to experience disturbing "flashbacks" to his unresolved and turbulent past. It is winter in Montreal. Dr. Satorius, head of Coldhaven Manor, a psychiatric clinic just outside the city, is taken to court by former patients. He is accused of conducting unorthodox drug-testing and brainwashing experiments there twenty-five years earlier. The much-publicized trial and the full-scale...