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R. Franklin James

The Fallen Angels Book Club has only two requirements: the members must love books and have a white-collar criminal record. Hollis Morgan fits the bill. Left holding the bag in an insurance-fraud scheme concocted by her now ex-husband, she served her time and is trying to rebuild her life. All she wants is for the court to pardon her conviction so she can return to law school. After one of her fellow members is murdered in a scenario straight out of a club selection, Hollis is once again the subject of police scrutiny. Refusing to get stuck with another bad rap, she sets out to investigate her fellow club members. Is one of them really blackmailing the others? As a second member dies in yet another book-inspired murder, Hollis realizes that time is running out. Everyone is convinced she knows more than she lets on. But what is it, exactly, that she’s supposed to know?

Caitlin Cavannaugh

Dreamscape Media

A Hollis Morgan Mystery

The Fallen Angels Book Club

Despite what the old children's rhyme says, words can cause grievous harm. It’s a lesson ex-con Hollis Morgan, a casualty of her deceased ex-husband’s white-collar crimes, knows all too well. Now that she has received an official pardon, she’s free to pursue her dreams of moving up in the world from paralegal to attorney. While awaiting the results of the bar exam, she hopes to clear the name of a friend accused of libel by philanthropist Dorian Fields, a man whose charitable giving looks a lot like money-laundering. The only problem? The evidence has disappeared, and her friend Catherine is found dead. Although initially thought a suicide, Hollis's friend was murdered. Catherine was writing an article about Fields for a tabloid. Hollis and attorney Mark Haddan convince the magazine to let them carry on with the libel defense, but they have fewer than sixty days to prove Catherine’s exposé was well-founded. In the meantime, Hollis has other distractions: she’s helping to settle the estate of Margaret Koch—a rich client of the law firm whose impetuous actions, as revealed in her letters, still embitter the lives of those she left behind—and then there are the two men vying for her attention—one a police detective, the other a private eye. Normally Hollis trusts her built-in lie detector, but in this case, too many people are lying for too many reasons—and one of them is not only a liar, but a killer.

Sticks & Stones

Hollis Morgan married young to flee an unloving family and ended up in prison, paying the price for her charming husband’s embezzlement. After finally obtaining a California judicial pardon, Hollis has climbed the ladder from paralegal to probate attorney at a respected law firm in the Bay Area. Unfortunately her first two cases are trials by fire, including the murder of her former parole officer, Jeffrey Wallace, whose will and family trust she is retained to file with the court. Too many people have motives and family mourners are few, so she resists processing the estate. Without Jeffrey, Hollis’s successful reentry into society would never have been possible. It was he who introduced her to the Fallen Angels—his other white-collar ex-parolees seeking a second chance. The book club they formed was a comfort and a distraction—until two murders forced them back under the scrutiny of the law. The group disbanded during the ensuing investigation. Now, realizing their debt to Jeffrey, they come together once more, determined to uncover the truth. Although Hollis has met a great guy—a police detective who knows about her past yet accepts her unconditionally—she is afraid to trust again. Naturally he doesn’t want to see her put her life in danger for the sake of a case, but he also knows she won’t stop until Jeffrey’s murderer is discovered. As both cases heat up, Hollis finds that probate law can bring out the worst in people—and sometimes expose a killer.

The Return of the Fallen Angels Book Club

Hollis Morgan has come a long way since serving time for her ex-husband’s white-collar crimes. After receiving a state pardon, she is now a probate attorney at the Bay Area firm, where she began as a paralegal. In a case close to home, her manager, George Ravel, inherits a fortune from his newly found birth mother, but her dead husband’s heirs are overcome with greed, not grief. They are determined to discredit her will and deny her natural son even one cent of the millions they believe should belong to their father’s estate. 

George asks Hollis to handle the case, but her attention is divided. A dead woman has been discovered with Hollis’s business card—one that dates back to Hollis’s years on parole. The police don’t believe Hollis’s claim that she never met Olivia Shur. As it turns out, she did know the woman, only under another name. At the time of her death, Olivia Shur possessed a list that could end the careers and lives of several public officials and prominent businessmen. Copies of that list exist. Someone believes Hollis has one of them—and they’ll go to any extreme to obtain it. 

To protect her friends and stay alive, Hollis turns to her ex-con buddies from the Fallen Angels Book Club. In this case, there are too many people on both sides of the law who are determined to see her stopped.

The Trade List

Hollis Morgan has survived imprisonment, received a pardon, and persevered to finally become a probate attorney. Tough as she is, her newest case will test her mettle. She discovers her client, Matthias Bell, is a deceased blackmailer whose last wish was to return damaging documents, letting his victims off the hook. It falls to Hollis to give them the good news. But it becomes apparent that Bell was murdered, and the victims of “Bell’s tolls” are now suspects. Hollis’s white-collar criminal past has left her with keen survival instincts. A gifted liar, she knows a liar when she sees one. A lot of people in this case are lying—and one is a killer. 

On top of that, she’s also representing a dying stripper—a wealthy widow whose estranged daughter spurns her attempts at reconciliation but whose husband sees the potential inheritance as mending all wounds. 

Clients aside, Hollis is defensive and wary. Her mother, who hasn’t spoken to her for years, needs a kidney, and Hollis is a match, but neither are ready to put away the past. With Hollis’s fiancé and emotional support off on an undercover mission for Homeland Security, she must count on her own survival instincts. She is swept along on an emotional roller coaster as her absent love and her family’s coldness take their own toll. Work is her salvation. The specter of a killer keeps her focused. Hollis has always had to rely on her wits, but now she finds that others who don’t have her well-being in mind are relying on them as well.

The Bell Tolls

Pardoned after serving time for her then-husband's white-collar crime, Hollis Morgan knows something about the workings of the criminal mind, but her first criminal case quickly gets complicated. Her client is a young man initially accused of identity theft, but his charge soon includes murder. Hollis has a knack for detecting lies, and although Justin Eastland lies with every breath, she doesn't believe he is a killer. Eastland is let out on bail as bait, and Hollis struggles to keep her client alive. She enlists the services of her young friend Vince, a former addict she helped get back on track, telling him to not let Eastland out of his sight. At the same time, Hollis is handling a sensitive probate matter for a whistle-blower hiding from a revengeful cartel. It hasn’t been easy for Hollis to learn to trust again, and in both these cases, a surprising number of people are not telling her the whole story. She thinks she can sort the truths from the half-truths and the outright lies, but how reliable are her instincts? Hollis's sense of justice does not always consider the law. If she's wrong, her clients aren't the only ones who could lose their lives.