The Long Fall — Daniel Quentin Steele

OJ SIMPSON, CASEY ANTHONY, TRAYVON MARTIN

Three of the best known names in the world, figuring in three of the most internationally famous criminal trials of the past quarter century.
Those trials made their names famous and made media stars of defense attorneys. Prosecutors don't fare as well. Which Jacksonville Assistant State Attorney William Maitland says only exposes the most ill-concealed secret of the criminal justice system.
“ That's what most people don't understand. The people with real power aren't cops. They just investigate and arrest. The people with real power aren't judges. They have a lot of power, but who they see and what charges they deliberate on don't come from them
I decide that. In my hands is the power to decide who is arrested and who is released; who faces death or 25 years or who gets mercy. And there really is no oversight, nobody looking over my shoulder.
Cops can bitch, but my decisions are final. Judges can bitch and threaten to take action, but they never do. The only person with any real power is the Big Man, and he had given me the Keys to the Kingdom and he had never in five years countermanded any decision I'd made.
Most of the time it doesn't bother me. I've made mistakes, but it comes with the territory. Surgeons kill people. It's how they learn. I have sent people to prison who didn't deserve what they got and let people go free or out early and regretted my actions. But it's part of the job.”
William Maitland has that power because the eyes of the Big Man �" Florida State Attorney Dallas Edwards - are focused on the Governor's Chair in Tallahassee in 2006 and he trusts his top assistant to garner the headlines needed to win that office.
Follow the loves, hates, affairs and blazing sexual encounters behind closed doors that are a part of the court system in Jacksonville. Because, as one Public Defender notes, “every courthouse is just a little Peyton Place.”
“When We Were Married" is the story of the death of a marriage of a driven prosecutor and a beautiful professor, and what happens afterward.
It has psychiatrists and assassins and CIA Black Ops teams, the protective head of a deadly Colombian Crime Cartel, a cold blooded and savage murderer who is determined to save the wife and family of the prosecutor who sent him to prison, the Angel of Death, the Shark and the Iceman. It features loyal friends, friendly enemies and really, really bad people.
The first volume of four, "The Long Fall" introduces Bill Maitland, a short, fat, balding Assistant in the Florida State Attorney's Office in Jacksonville, Florida in 2005. He is married to Debbie Maitland-Bascomb, a tall, gorgeous, blonde Associate Professor of Economics at the University of North Florida (UNF) in Jacksonville.
Over the past five years Maitland has lost touch with his wife and two children as the demands of his job have swallowed up his personal life.
He is, despite the demands of the job, an ignorantly happy man until the night his wife utters four fatal words. That Freudian slip unleashes his pit-bull instincts upon his wife and results in a discovery that changes both their lives forever.
In the courtroom, Maitland will face baby killers and stone cold drug lords, mercy killers and deadly grannies, killer cops and drug cartels.
Against these and all odds, Maitland is armed only with a superb legal mind, the powers of the prosecutor's office, bulldog stubbornness and a compulsion to do the right thing no matter what the cost. And a basic decency that gives him surprising allies from the Florida underworld to a Colombian crime cartel.
And in the wake of a bitter divorce, Debbie Maitland-Bascomb will dump Maitland for a gorgeous young stud, but will find that beauty is not a shield against pain and loneliness, and that it is harder to walk away from Maitland than she expected it to be.