With money and hope in short supply, newly minted attorney Brigham Theodore decides it’s time to lower his standards. He joins a seedy fly-by-night firm in Salt Lake City out of desperation. After he loses his first case―a speeding ticket―he’s convinced his career is over. But to his shock, his boss hands him a slightly more complex case: capital murder. Brigham’s new client is Amanda Pierce, a lost, exhausted woman who gunned down the man who tortured and killed her six-year-old daughter. A jury may prove sympathetic to her unbearable pain, but the law is no fan of vigilante justice―and neither is Vince Dale, the slick and powerful prosecutor who’s never lost a murder case. There’s no question that Amanda pulled the trigger―she did it in front of five witnesses. If she pleads guilty, she will avoid a death sentence, but saving her life this way comes with an admission that what she did was wrong. However, if she refuses the “guilty” label, Brigham will have no choice but to fight for his career―and Amanda’s life. Revised edition: This edition of The Neon Lawyer includes editorial revisions.
Brigham Theodore is a courtroom brawler, a criminal defense attorney who spends his time slugging it out with the government in court. A year after winning his biggest case, he finds himself at a new firm defending clients of every kind. Drug dealers, gangsters, con men and thugs are the people he defends every day. For him, the fight is what matters. As the new hotshot lawyer in town, Brigham is referred an engineer accused of euthanizing his wife who was dying of pancreatic cancer. Brigham believes the case to be an easy one, a plea deal down the line for a sympathetic husband. But Vince Dale, once the prosecutor on Brigham's biggest case and now the County Attorney, remembers the sting of defeat and refuses to make a plea bargain on the case. With nothing left to lose, Brigham must use every ounce of fight he has in him to defend a man who has the full weight of the government pressing down on him, and who might not survive it.