Crime & Defense Books in Order

Crime & Defense feels like an early blueprint for a lot of what Carsen Taite does best. These books are rooted in criminal law, but they are just as interested in attraction, loyalty, and the way personal choices can blow up inside a public case. The result is a set of stories that lean hard into courtroom drama without forgetting the romance.

This is a looser series than something like Lone Star Law. The books are connected by shared characters and a common legal world rather than one single ongoing plot. Start with It Should Be a Crime, then move to The Best Defense, and you can watch that world widen from one high-pressure case to another.

Everything begins with the defense side of the table.

In It Should Be a Crime, a one-night hookup turns into a problem when law professor Morgan Bradley realizes Parker Casey is her student. Then a major murder trial forces them into close quarters and turns a private complication into a public mess. The Best Defense shifts the spotlight to former homicide detective Skye Keaton and socialite Aimee Howard, using a search for a missing young woman to bring criminal defense work, federal attention, and romance into the same frame.

What links the series is Taite's interest in people who believe in justice but do not always trust the system delivering it. Defense lawyers, investigators, and outsiders all have to make quick judgments about what is true, what can be proven, and what it will cost to keep going. That tension gives the books their bite. The romances grow out of the cases, not away from them.

Even in these earlier books, you can see Taite's habits as a storyteller. She likes smart women with strong opinions. She likes legal procedure that actually affects the outcome. She likes moral gray areas, especially when two people on the same side still disagree about how far they should go. And she likes giving a suspense plot enough room to matter.

If you want to see where her courtroom fiction really takes shape, Crime & Defense is worth reading. The books are fast, emotional, and a little messy in the best way, full of legal strategy, dangerous cases, and women who discover that love is sometimes the least predictable part of the whole fight.