The Trial in the Museum Basement
A 1950s Courtroom Drama

About this book:

Rain-slick Chicago, 1954. Public defender Frank Miller makes forty-two hundred a year defending men who can't afford coffee, until a silent prisoner in a tailored suit lands on his docket. The charge: burglary at the Metropolitan Museum. The evidence: a smashed display case that was supposedly empty for six years. The defendant: Henry Hovey, nephew of the museum's founding benefactor, who claims the basement vaults are being looted by the very trustees sworn to protect them.

When the museum's power brokers lean on the judge for a quiet plea deal, Frank counters with a desperate gambit: move the courtroom into the sublevel archives where the crime occurred. Down in the coal-dust dark, beneath marble lions and bronze age relics, a trial begins that the city's elite will kill to bury. Every witness is a lie, every document a forgery, and the only record that matters is the one Frank can force into the stenographer's log before the vault doors seal shut.

Atmospheric, sharp-edged, and driven by a hero who refuses to look away, *The Trial in the Museum Basement* is a courtroom noir where the law is just another weapon—and the truth belongs to whoever survives long enough to enter it into evidence.