new normal, including the loss of his career. “Jack and I share a commitment to not letting our disorder define us and in focusing on the doors that we can open rather than the ones that are closed,” Goldman said. Goldman started his first book in 1992, and it was published in 2002 – “making me a 10-year overnight success,” he quipped. His first four novels were published while he was still practicing. Along the way, Goldman said, he learned to be a better critical self-editor and apply more creativity to his legal writing. But he doesn’t think his legal training was essential to his success as a novelist. “My books are more about the characters – what happens when things go wrong, especially when they think no one is looking – than they are about the plot,” Goldman said. “As a trial lawyer, I had to learn all I could about whatever my cases concerned, whether it was how a business operated or a product was made. That’s Goldman sets all the plot. The clients, the witnesses, the of his books in opposing lawyers, the judge and the his native Kansas jury are the characters, and they aren’t City, where he any different than other people. You was a partner for don’t have to be a lawyer to write 18 years at Husch about them.” Goldman sets Blackwell Sanders. all of his books in his native Kansas City, where he was a partner for 18 years at the law firm now known as Husch Blackwell Sanders. Before that, he was a partner at Shamberg, Johnson, Bergman & Goldman and, earlier, at Schnider, Shamberg and May. He practiced in the areas of torts and business and commercial litigation. “I’ve been away from the practice for almost four years, and I miss it more than when I left,” he said. “I miss the camaraderie and combat, working with clients and being in the courtroom.” Always an avid reader, Goldman’s favorite writers in the mystery and thriller genre include Crais, James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, Sara Paretsky and many others. The next book in the Jack Davis series will be out in September 2010. Don’t expect Goldman’s legal alma mater to make a cameo. “I’d be happy to work the law school into one of my future books,” he said, “as soon as sex and murder make it out of the hornbooks and into the hallways.”
Books by Joel Goldman, L’77
2009 Billionaire Milo Harper wants Jack Davis’ help. People in Harper’s study of the human brain are starting to die exactly as they have dreamed they would die. Harper hires Jack to find out why their nightmares are coming true and protect his foundation.
2008 The lives of three people collide over mass murder at a Kansas City residence that Special Agent Jack Davis has carefully staked out for weeks.
2005 For 15 years, death-row inmate Ryan Kowalczyk denied killing a young couple in their car as their 3-year-old lay sleeping in the back seat. But when his friend Whitney King, who also stood accused, turned against him, his fate was sealed. Attorney Lou Mason uncovers deceipt, corruption and murder while investigating King.
2004 Attorney Lou Mason defends Jordan Hackett on charges she threw nationally syndicated talk-radio shrink Dr. Gina Davenport to her death from an eighth-floor window. To prove Hackett’s innocence, Mason must expose a devastating black-market operation and survive a remorseless psychopath.
2003 Kansas City trial attorney Lou Mason is back … and this time, it’s personal. Hired to defend the accused murderer of Jack Cullan, a local lawyer and political fixer, he finds himself working for a close friend. But as he closes in on a desperate killer, Mason may be setting himself up as the next target.
2002 Richard Sullivan was at the top of his profession, a rainmaker in a powerful Kansas City law firm – until his body washed up on the shores of a Missouri lake. Now questions about his death, and his life, reverberate through a firm that has more to cover up than it ever knew.
KU LAW MAGAZINE 23