Clay Masterson doesn't believe in ghosts. But when his best friend, Andy, claims to have seen the ghost rumored to be in the Dexter County Courthouse, Clay begins to wonder....

Winner, Next Generation Indie Book Awards - Women's Nonfiction Best Book of 2020, National Law Journal The inspiring and previously untold history of the women considered—but not selected—for the US Supreme Court In 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female justice on the United States Supreme Court after centuries of male appointments, a watershed moment in the long struggle for gender equality. Yet few know about the remarkable women considered in the decades before her triumph. Shortlisted tells the overlooked stories of nine extraordinary women—a cohort large enough to seat the entire Supreme Court—who appeared on presidential lists dating back to the 1930s. Florence Allen, the first female judge on the highest court in Ohio, was named repeatedly in those early years. Eight more followed, including Amalya Kearse, a federal appellate judge who was the first African American woman viewed as a potential Supreme Court nominee. Award-winning scholars Renee Knake Jefferson and Hannah Brenner Johnson cleverly weave together long-forgotten materials from presidential libraries and private archives to reveal the professional and personal lives of these accomplished women. In addition to filling a notable historical gap, the book exposes the tragedy of the shortlist. Listing and bypassing qualified female candidates creates a false appearance of diversity that preserves the status quo, a fate all too familiar for women, especially minorities. Shortlisted offers a roadmap to combat enduring bias and discrimination. It is a must-read for those seeking positions of power as well as for the powerful who select them in the legal profession and beyond.

Nearly 5,000 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1960. Over forty years later, Sherrilyn Ifill's On the Courthouse Lawn examines the numerous ways that this racial trauma still resounds across the United States. While the lynchings and their immediate aftermath were devastating, the little-known contemporary consequences, such as the marginalization of political and economic development for black Americans, are equally pernicious. On the Courthouse Lawn investigates how the lynchings implicated average white citizens, some of whom actively participated in the violence while many others witnessed the lynchings but did nothing to stop them. Ifill observes that this history of complicity has become embedded in the social and cultural fabric of local communities, who either supported, condoned, or ignored the violence. She traces the lingering effects of two lynchings in Maryland to illustrate how ubiquitous this history is and issues a clarion call for American communities with histories of racial violence to be proactive in facing this legacy today. Inspired by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as by techniques of restorative justice, Ifill provides concrete ideas to help communities heal, including placing gravestones on the unmarked burial sites of lynching victims, issuing public apologies, establishing mandatory school programs on the local history of lynching, financially compensating those whose family homes or businesses were destroyed in the aftermath of lynching, and creating commemorative public spaces. Because the contemporary effects of racial violence are experienced most intensely in local communities, Ifill argues that reconciliation and reparation efforts must also be locally based in order to bring both black and white Americans together in an efficacious dialogue. A landmark book, On the Courthouse Lawn is a much-needed and urgent road map for communities finally confronting lynching's long shadow by embracing pragmatic reconciliation and reparation efforts.

New York Times bestselling master of suspense Steve Martini returns, ensnaring defense attorney Paul Madriani in a web of terror and death being spun in the shadows of America's most sacred and secretive institution-the Supreme Court.A writer is savagely slain while on a publicity tour-a literary provocateur who craved headlines, but whose last book may have gone too far. His revelations about secret language buried in the U.S. Constitution-and hints about an explosive missing letter of Thomas Jefferson's-may be enough to cause an irreparable tear in the fabric of the nation . . . and perhaps drove a volatile youth to homicide. But Paul Madriani thinks a troubled young man with dark connections has been chosen as a scapegoat to cover up something far deadlier that festers in America's political heart. And in the wake of the strange disappearance of a Supreme Court judge, Madriani must survive long enough to find the devastating answers hidden in the shadow of power.

In the Shadow of the Courthouse invites the reader to imagine coming of age (8 to 13) in Clinton, Iowa in the middle of the United States, in the middle of the century (1942-1947) and in the middle of this farm belt community of 33,000 snuggled against the muddy Mississippi River during World War Two, and in the shadow of the courthouse with its magnificent four-sided face clock chiming the time every half hour and looking down on you no matter where you might go. It is in this working class climate that the author came of age in the shadow of that courthouse while the nation struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb. There was no television. There were no mega sports. Nor were there big automobiles, or manicured lawns. There was radio, movies, high school sports, and the Industrial Baseball League, where men too young or too old to go to war played baseball for the fun of it. Clintonians, as everyone was known, had victory gardens, drove old jalopies, took the bus or rode their bicycles to work. It was a time when the four faces of the magnificent Clinton County Courthouse clock chimed on the half hour, and threw a metaphorical shadow over young people's lives. This made certain they would not have any excuse for being late for meals made essentially from victory garden staples. The courthouse neighborhood, which is the focus of this story, had most stay-at-home mothers in two-parent families. Few parents managed to get beyond grammar school, nearly all worked in Clinton factories or on the railroad. Divorce was as foreign as an ancestral language. It was a time when Clinton families during atrocious summer hot spells could be found to be sleeping in Riverview Park near the Mississippi River, watching the river barges pass in the night. It was not uncommon for people to leave their windows open, their doors unlocked, and bicycles on the side of the house, and if they had automobiles, keys in the car, secure in the knowledge that neither neighbor nor stranger would disturb their possessions. In winter, schools were never closed even when snow banks were four feet high.In the Shadow of the Courthouse is a narrative snapshot of core neighborhood activities of young people against the backdrop of the courthouse, St. Patrick's School, Riverview Stadium, downtown Clinton and uptown Lyons, Bluff Boulevard, Hoot Owl Hollow, Mount St. Clare College, Mill Creek, Beaver Slough, Joyce Slough, the churches, schools, and hospitals throughout the city, U.S. Army's Schick General Hospital, which brought the war to this place, tending battlefield casualties, the USO, Chicago & North Western Railway, Clinton Foods, Du Pont, and many other industries, which were working hard toward the war effort as seen through the impressionistic eyes of the author as a boy from age eight to thirteen. It was also a time when kids created their own play, as parents were too tired or too involved in the struggle to make a living to pay them much mind. Clinton youngsters would never know such Darwinian freedom or its concomitant brutality again. This is not a history of the times. Nor is this a novel in the conventional sense, but rather the recollections of a time, place and circumstance through the author's self-confessed imperfect vision. In the Shadow of the Courthouse promises to awaken that sleeping child in the reader of every age.