Stand Your Ground

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High Noon meets Mean Girls

Riding her bike home from dinner one night, Cady Fox runs into Octavius Mingo on the basketball court at Jefferson and shoots him to death. She claims self-defense. But is there more to the story than she's telling the police?

When Cady Fox leaves dinner with the senior attorneys at her law firm one spring night, the only thing on her mind is: Will they make her a partnership offer the next morning? What she doesn’t expect is to be accosted on her bike ride home in an inner-city park by a man whose nefarious intent requires her to shoot him to death on a deserted basketball court at 11 p.m.

Growing up poor in Appalachia, Cady had few expectations that she would be a success in Big Law. Now, on the cusp of her greatest moment, she becomes the focus of a police investigator tired of people claiming white privilege when killing Black men and a public outcry for justice for the dead man.

For Cady Fox, her world cracked open long before she found herself face to muzzle with a .45 on the concrete jungle of a desolate urban basketball court at an hour before midnight one spring night. The line between stand your ground and murder always blurs in the moment of a confrontation. Cady is forced to navigate the criminal justice system and the societal tensions that come with that blur, learning how the past eats your soul when your only choices are to run or stand your ground.

Stand Your Ground is as timely and provocative as tomorrow's clickbait Internet headline. In a legal thriller that will keep you guessing to the very end, author A.J. Ullman has created a fictional up-from-the-hills heroine smart enough to out lawyer J.D. Vance and tough enough to whoop his ex-Marine ass….

n  Jim DeBrosse, contributing editor to Cincinnati Magazine and long-time former reporter for The Cincinnati Enquirer, author of numerous books including See No Evil, The Secret in Building 26, Hidden City, The Serpentine Wall, and more.