Book 3 of the Jordan Monroe Legal Thrillers. It stands on its own — but if you’re new to Jordan, start with Contagion of Lies and watch the series build from the beginning.
The DNA is real. The crime scene is real. The story they tell is a lie.
A young woman is dead. Her blood carries Ethan Cole’s DNA, and the match is confirmed. The police have their arrest. The case should be closed before it opens.
Except the evidence is too perfect.
The blood pattern doesn’t match the violence. The timeline doesn’t match the facts. Every answer only makes the case stranger — as if someone wrote it to be convicted, not to be true.
Defense attorney Jordan Monroe has watched guilty men walk and innocent men fall. But she’s never seen a case engineered — every piece of proof placed to survive a courtroom instead of to reveal what happened.
Because someone didn’t just commit murder.
Someone built the evidence.
And if Jordan is right, the most dangerous person in the courtroom isn’t the defendant in the chair. It’s the person who designed the case around him — and who’s counting on twelve jurors never asking the one question that unravels everything.
To win, Jordan has to prove that real evidence can tell a manufactured story. To survive, she has to do it before the architect of the case decides she’s seen too much.
Guilty by Design is a legal thriller for readers of Scott Turow, Michael Connelly, and Robert Dugoni — where the DNA is real, the evidence is convincing, and the truth it tells was built to deceive.
