Say hello to Alex Stone

Joel Introduces Alex Stone in Stone Cold, the first in the Series

Alex Stone is a Public Defender, devoted to representing people charged with a crime who can’t afford a lawyer. More often than not, her clients and cases are lost causes. But the dismal odds only encourage her. Long, lean, and ropy from years of early-morning workouts, she knows only one way to live and one way to try a case: bear down and go all out.

Alex is determined to give her indigent clients the same measure of justice the rich and well bred receive. That’s what everyone, guilty or innocent, highborn or low, deserves, and that’s why she became a public defender. That higher calling matters more than whether her clients are guilty or innocent.

Though she believes in the criminal justice system, she knows that judges and juries don’t always get it right. Sometimes the guilty go free and the innocent are convicted. She accepts that as an inescapable flaw in the system because she can’t conceive of a better way to see that justice is done. All that changes when she wins an acquittal for a client accused of murder that becomes a suspect in a murderous rampage. Driven by guilt and a determination not to let something that horrible happen again, she dispenses her own brand of justice, struggling not to lose herself in the process.

Alex and her girlfriend, Bonnie Long, an emergency room physician, have been together for years. Bonnie’s blond hair, sapphire eyes, and lush body place her securely in the one percent. Alex sees herself as part of the ninety-nine percent, her features and shape ordinary, no matter how often Bonnie tells her she is extraordinary. Quincy, their Wheaten terrier, is the third member of their family. They live in Crestwood, a middle-class midtown neighborhood in Kansas City.