Cases that Inspired the Book

 Stand Up For Bastards is based on my life working in the cops-and-robbers business for the past 15 years.  The plot and characters are fictional, but the types of problems, issues, and people I put in the book are very much reflections of the types of problems, issues and people who work in this field.  I hope that lawyers, agents, cops, and other professionally sophisticated consumers of crime fiction will be able to get through it without tossing it aside as b.s., which I have done plenty of times with crime novels and law novels.  For those readers who are interested in reading my thoughts about some of the real cases that inspired the book-- published cases, not my cases, which I'm not going to discuss here-- I wrote a thirty-page Afterword.  But it was too long for the print copy, so I am putting those comments here.  I'm thinking particularly about law students and young lawyers thinking about getting into litigation.  But anyone who's interested in the crazy stuff that happens in real cases will hopefully like them as well.