The Rural Lives of Nice Girls
No Charity in the Wilderness

The Silver State

When a public defender receives a letter from a client on death row, he is forced to reexamine his role in the murder case he cannot shake; a gripping and thought-provoking legal thriller that redefines the genre–by critically acclaimed writer and criminal defense attorney

What if justice isn’t something the legal system is truly capable of?

Law school graduate Santi Elcano’s idealism is wearing away by the cases and clients he’s assigned. When a young mother, Anna Weston, is brutally murdered and her body is found near Reno’s infamous silver mines, Santi and his mentor in the public defender’s office, C.J., are tasked with defending Michael Atwood, a man arrested for Anna’s murder on scant physical evidence.

Eight years later, a shocking letter from Atwood–now on death row–forces Santi to reexamine his role in the case. At the time, public obsession with Anna’s disappearance and intense pressure on the police to make an arrest led to a rushed trial. As they investigated the case, Santi and C.J. became increasingly convinced they were defending an innocent man. Now, a horrific discovery leads Santi to reconsider everything he once believed, and all that it has cost him–love, family, and friendship.

Illuminating the deals that get cut in the name of justice, The Silver State explores the murkiness between victim and perpetrator, and the cost of a life in the law. Turning the legal thriller on its head, Urza tells an electrifying, emotionally charged tale of systemic failure and moral ambiguity that asks: What if justice isn’t something the legal system is truly capable of? For readers of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.”

More Non-Juvenile Books

  • Each letter is written from a specific place that Hugo has made his own (a "triggering town," as he has called it elsewhere) to a friend, a fellow poet, an old love.

  • "A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue."--The New York Times Book Review

  • Mya Dubois left Gauthier, Louisiana determined never to look back. Broadway gave her the career she dreamed of, but coming home means facing the one thing she cannot design her way around... the man who shattered her heart.

  • Rejected by her embittered mother and scorned by her classmates, Elnora Comstock seeks consolation in nature amid the wilds of eastern Indiana's Limberlost Swamp.