Goodlove and Shek Books in Order

The Goodlove and Shek books are legal thrillers built around a small law firm in Redwood Point, Northern California. Garrett Goodlove is the main point of view, and he is not the usual smooth courtroom shark. He used to be a hard-driving criminal defense attorney, but grief and depression changed the way he works and the kinds of cases he takes.

That shift matters. Garrett still knows how to fight, but he brings more hesitation, empathy, and self-doubt to the job than many thriller lawyers do. Jen Shek is his law partner, and Garrett's family, especially his twin sister Carly and his daughter Nicole, keeps pulling the cases closer to home than he would probably choose on his own.

These books care about what a case does to the people around it.

The mysteries themselves vary a lot. One story opens with Carly accused of killing her husband. Another centers on a client who may be lying about nearly everything. Later books move into medical malpractice, a murder suspect with profound amnesia, and a missing young woman whose own choices may put her on the path to a murder charge. There is also Damaging Quarantine, a shorter story that squeezes the characters together during lockdown and shows how thin the wall between work trouble and home trouble can be.

Macy writes the legal and investigative sides together. Garrett interviews clients, studies weak spots in police work, worries over what people are hiding, and tries to figure out who is telling the truth long before a case reaches court. The books are less about flashy speeches and more about pressure. Pressure from family. Pressure from illness. Pressure from money. Pressure from knowing that a bad call can ruin somebody's life.

The series also has a grounded social feel that sets it apart from Macy's more speculative work. Carly's role brings in questions of communication and isolation, and Garrett's depression is not just background color. It changes how he sees cases, how he handles conflict, and how much energy he has left when the workday ends. That gives the books a little more weight without slowing them down.

That is where the series gets its bite.

If you like legal suspense that stays personal, this is probably Macy's most grounded series. The crimes are serious, but the books never lose sight of the human damage around them. You can read them for the cases, and they do work that way, but the deeper pull is watching Garrett try to keep doing decent work in a profession, and a life, that rarely makes decency easy.