Beverley McLachlin Books in Order

If you want the legal thrillers in order: Full Disclosure → Denial → Proof
If you want the best first Jilly case: Full Disclosure
If you want Beverley McLachlin's own story: Truth Be Told

Beverley McLachlin was born in Pincher Creek, Alberta, and grew up in the foothills of southern Alberta, the oldest of five children. Books mattered early. So did school. In a small town where the path for girls could look pretty fixed, education gave her a bigger horizon, and an early sense that fairness was not just a nice idea, it was something people had to work at.

She studied philosophy at the University of Alberta, then added law, earning her LL.B. and graduating at the top of her class. She was called to the Alberta bar in 1969 and the British Columbia bar in 1971, practised law in both provinces, and later taught at the University of British Columbia. Those years gave her a close view of how institutions work, how power speaks, and how often women had to push their way into rooms that were not built for them.

She kept pushing.

Her judicial career moved quickly. She joined the Vancouver County Court in 1981, the Supreme Court of British Columbia later that year, the British Columbia Court of Appeal in 1985, and the Supreme Court of Canada in 1989. In 2000 she became Chief Justice of Canada, the first woman to hold the job, and she stayed in that role until retiring in 2017. For many readers, that public record is the headline. What makes her story more interesting is the person behind it, someone who came from a rural background, loved ideas, and never lost sight of what the law means in ordinary lives.

That human side is front and center in Truth Be Told, her memoir. In it, she writes about childhood in Alberta, studying law in the 1960s, family life, grief, sexism, and the long pull of the justice system. Readers often come to the book for the history and stay for the voice. It is direct, thoughtful, and easy to follow, even when the subjects are hard. The book went on to win major nonfiction prizes in Canada, which fits the way it blends public history with personal story.

Fiction had been waiting in the wings for a long time. McLachlin has said she wanted to write novels well before she became a judge, and she returned to that wish in early mornings, weekends, vacations, and any spare stretch of time. After leaving the Supreme Court, she had more room to follow it. The result was the Jilly Truitt series, beginning with Full Disclosure and continuing with Denial and Proof.

These books know how courtrooms work.

Jilly Truitt is a Vancouver defense lawyer, sharp, stubborn, and often walking into cases that look impossible. In Full Disclosure, she defends a wealthy man accused of murdering his wife. Denial turns to a supposed mercy killing and the secrets around one family. Proof raises the pressure again with a missing child and a mother accused of taking her own daughter. What readers tend to like here is the mix of insider detail and personal stakes. The legal arguments matter, but so do the people, the witnesses, the old loyalties, and the question of what truth looks like once it reaches court.

Vancouver matters in these books, too. So do questions McLachlin has clearly spent a lifetime thinking about: fairness, evidence, power, and the distance between what happened and what can actually be proved. She lives in Vancouver and has kept building a second career as an author. It is a late turn, maybe, but it does not feel accidental. It feels like another way of doing what she has always done, looking closely at how people make choices when the stakes are high.