Anna Curtis Books in Order

Allison Leotta was born in Detroit and grew up in Farmington Hills and Franklin, Michigan. Her father worked as a prosecutor in Detroit, so stories from the courthouse were part of family life early on. She also grew up in a big Michigan State family, attending Spartan football games long before she became a student there.

At Michigan State, Leotta studied international relations in the James Madison College. She went straight on to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1998. The work was demanding, but she has said that her undergraduate years taught her how to write clearly and think through a problem.

After law school, she clerked for a federal judge in Ohio, then joined the Justice Department through its Honors Program. She later moved to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C., where she handled sex crimes, domestic violence, and crimes against children.

In all, she spent twelve years as a federal prosecutor.

Leotta had always loved reading, but fiction came later. After days in court, she would come home with stories that felt too strange, painful, or dramatic to forget. Eventually, she decided she had to turn that steady stream of material, and her interest in how justice works, into a novel.

She began Law of Attraction while pregnant with her first son. She wrote before work, at night, and on weekends, then kept going during naps after he was born. What she expected to finish quickly took two years, a useful reminder that first books have a way of making their own schedules.

Law of Attraction introduced Anna Curtis, a young Washington prosecutor dealing with a murder case connected to domestic violence and an inconvenient former lover. Leotta followed it with Discretion, which sends Anna into a politically charged murder investigation, and Speak of the Devil, a darker case involving trafficking, gangs, and the threat of violence reaching close to home. In A Good Killing, Anna returns to Michigan to defend her sister, while The Last Good Girl follows a missing college student case shaped by questions of privilege and campus sexual assault.

The legal details matter, but the books are built around people under pressure.

Leotta's stories often return to the difficult overlap between love and harm. Her cases involve partners, friends, family members, and other people a victim should have been able to trust. Anna's own troubled past and complicated personal life run alongside the investigations, giving the series an ongoing thread beyond the courtroom.

In 2011, Leotta left the Justice Department to write full time. She has also written about the accuracy, and frequent inaccuracies, of television crime dramas. She lives outside Washington, D.C., with her husband, Michael, and their two sons.