Jason Kolarich Books in Order

The Jason Kolarich series follows a Chicago-area defense attorney who is as comfortable questioning witnesses as he is working the streets himself. Jason is smart, stubborn, and often carrying more personal baggage than is good for him, which makes his cases feel as much like survival stories as legal puzzles.

In The Hidden Man, he is hired by a childhood friend accused of killing the man long suspected of abducting the friend’s little sister decades earlier. A shadowy figure known only as Mr. Smith bankrolls the defense and tries to steer every decision, even as Jason digs into the old kidnapping and the secrets it left behind. The case pulls him out of his grief over a family tragedy and straight into someone else’s long-delayed revenge.

Breach of Trust puts Jason in the middle of political fallout after a key witness he once forced onto the stand turns up dead. Following the trail into a low-profile state agency, he discovers a culture of kickbacks and fraud that reaches the governor’s office. Strong-armed by federal agents into going undercover, Jason has to juggle his role as cooperating witness with his own need to understand who ordered the killing that still haunts him.

In The Wrong Man, he takes on the defense of a homeless Iraq war veteran with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, charged with murdering a young paralegal. The evidence looks awful and an insanity defense seems like the only option—until Jason starts to suspect the killing was a professional hit and his client was set up as a convenient scapegoat.

The Last Alibi brings the danger even closer. An awkward, nervous man named James Drinker hires Jason in advance, convinced he will soon be accused of a series of murders. As more women die and Jason keeps finding his client near the crime scenes, he has to decide how much he can trust the story he is being told, all while someone quietly builds a case against him instead.

Taken together, the Jason Kolarich novels mix courtroom maneuvers, investigative legwork, and moral gray zones. Jason bends rules, makes enemies in law enforcement and politics, and often risks his own freedom to get to the truth. Readers who like legal thrillers with a hardboiled edge and an ongoing, bruised but determined hero will feel at home here.

The series is best read in order, since Jason’s personal life and scars carry forward from book to book.