About The Silver State:
The Silver State is a gripping and thought-provoking legal thriller that redefines the genre—by critically acclaimed writer and criminal defense attorney, Gabriel Urza, author of All That Followed.
What if justice isn’t something the legal system is truly capable of?
The Silver State follows Santi, a law school graduate whose idealism is soon worn away by the cases and clients he’s assigned. When a young mother, Anna Weston, is brutally murdered and her body is found near Reno’s infamous silver mines, Santi and his mentor in the public defender’s office, C.J., are tasked with defending Michael Atwood, a man convicted on scant physical evidence and later sentenced to death.
Eight years later, a shocking letter from Atwood—now on death row—forces Santi to reexamine his role in the case. At the time, public obsession with Anna’s disappearance and intense pressure on the police to make an arrest led to a rushed trial. As they investigated the case Santi and C.J. became increasingly convinced they were defending an innocent man. Now, a horrific discovery leads Santi to reconsider everything he once believed, and all that it has cost him—love, family, and friendship.
The Silver State brings to vivid life the deals that get cut in the name of justice, the murkiness between victim and perpetrator, and the cost of a life in the law. Turning the legal thriller on its head, Urza tells an electrifying, emotionally charged tale of systemic failure and moral ambiguity that asks us: What if justice is a myth? For readers of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.
"Gabriel Urza has written a propulsive, hallucinatory, urgent novel—an interrogation of morality and violence, of the allure and fickleness of narrative, of the porousness between guilt and innocence within a system that casts even the most idealistic among us as unwitting—and often witting—co-conspirators. An already-complicated institution as his subject, Urza complicates it further in surprising, unsettling, and ultimately necessary ways. This book will haunt you."
--Sierra Crane Murdoch, author of the Pulitzer Prize– finalist Yellow Bird
Author bio:
Gabriel Urza is a writer, attorney, and university professor from Reno, Nevada. Urza is the author of the novel All That Followed (Henry Holt & Co./MacMillan 2015), which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a Publishers Weekly “Best of Summer” selection, a Booklist Best Crime Fiction Debut, and garnered starred reviews from Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly. He is also the author of the novellas The Last Supper(2021) and The White Death: An Illusion (2019), which was an Oregon Book Award finalist. His creative nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, Slate, Politico, Travel + Leisure, and other publications. He teaches Fiction in the MFA program at Portland State University and lives in Hood River, Oregon.