Robin Lockwood Books in Order

The Robin Lockwood series introduces a new kind of Margolin protagonist: a young defense attorney who is as comfortable in a mixed martial arts cage as she is in front of a jury. A Yale Law graduate who once fought professionally to help pay tuition, Robin builds her career in Portland while carrying the scars of past fights, both literal and emotional.

Her story begins in The Third Victim. Robin has just finished a clerkship at the Oregon Supreme Court and joined the firm of legendary trial lawyer Regina Barrister, known as “The Sorceress” for her skill with juries. Their first big case together involves Alex Mason, a prominent attorney accused of kidnapping and torturing women at his remote vacation home. A battered survivor identifies his property as the place she escaped from, and physical evidence backs her up. As Robin prepares for a likely death penalty trial, she notices that Regina is not quite herself and begins to suspect that both her mentor’s memory and the case against their client are less solid than they appear.

In The Perfect Alibi Robin steps into the spotlight. A college football star is convicted of rape based on DNA evidence and sent to prison, only for a second assault to occur while he is behind bars, with the same DNA profile pointing to the attacker. Robin represents the first victim in a civil case and gets pulled into a tangle of missing lawyers, pharmaceutical lawsuits, and a smug prosecutor all circling around the question of how an airtight case could fall apart. The book pushes her to juggle multiple clients and to think about how science can both clarify and distort the truth.

A Reasonable Doubt blends courtroom drama with locked room mystery. Years earlier Regina successfully defended magician Robert Chesterfield when he was charged with murder and attempted murder, cases clouded by his flair for misdirection. Now he returns to the firm asking for help protecting a new illusion. Robin looks into his past as he prepares a trick called the Chamber of Death. During a high profile performance Chesterfield vanishes for good, and Robin must sort through decades of grudges, suspicious deaths, and stage tricks to answer the basic question no one can agree on: did someone kill him, or did he engineer his own disappearance?

In A Matter of Life and Death Robin takes on the defense of Joe Lattimore, a homeless former boxer who agrees to fight in an illegal bout to earn quick cash for his family. When the other fighter dies and Joe is blackmailed into breaking into a judge’s house, he walks in on a fresh murder scene and becomes the obvious suspect. The evidence looks overwhelming, from fingerprints to eyewitnesses, but Robin senses a frame up tied to secrets in the victim’s marriage and the judge’s private life. The case tests her belief that the system can still be fair to someone with no money and no status.

The Darkest Place finds Robin reeling from a personal tragedy linked to an earlier client. She retreats to her small Midwestern hometown to grieve, only to be asked to help with a strange local case involving a surrogate mother who has taken the baby she carried and assaulted the couple who hired her. As Robin digs in she discovers that the woman is living under a new identity and is wanted in Oregon for the murder of her husband, a crime that connects back to financial fraud and threats from organized crime. Robin has to split her attention between two jurisdictions and two very different juries while deciding whether her client is a victim, a villain, or something in between.

In Murder at Black Oaks Robin is invited to a remote, fog wrapped mansion in the Oregon mountains by a retired district attorney haunted by a wrongful conviction from his past. The house is said to be cursed, the guest list is combustible, and when the host is found dead under impossible circumstances inside a locked elevator, Robin is left with both a fresh murder and an old injustice to unravel.

Betrayal brings her history as a fighter crashing into her legal life. Years earlier, Robin’s promising MMA career ended when she was knocked out by a tougher opponent, Mandy Kerrigan. Now Mandy is washed up and accused of gunning down an entire family tied to Russian mobsters and a shady legal practice. Robin agrees to defend the woman who once beat her bloody, even as she faces off in court against a prosecutor she has just started to date. The case forces her to balance loyalty, rivalry, and personal risk in new ways.

Taken together, the Robin Lockwood novels mix classic Margolin strengths — tight plots, surprising twists, and believable courtroom strategy — with a fresh heroine who carries her own physical and emotional history into every case. The series leans into puzzles and moral gray areas, all set against the rain, rivers, and courthouses of Oregon.