The Hidden Man

The Hidden Man is David Ellis’s 2009 standalone Chicago legal thriller, the second in his loose Jason Kolarich series and the one that established the voice the Patterson collaborations later borrowed. Jason Kolarich, a recently widowed Chicago defense attorney, is asked to represent his childhood friend Sammy Cutler, accused of murdering the man who twenty-seven years earlier kidnapped and killed Audrey Reinhardt, Jason’s younger sister. The case wraps both Jason’s working life and his earliest unresolved family wound around the same trial calendar.

Ellis is a working Illinois Appellate justice, and the courtroom procedural here is some of the most authoritative late-2000s American legal fiction. The voir-dire chapters, the evidentiary rulings, the trial-strategy team meetings all read as transcribed rather than imagined. The dual-timeline structure (1980 Chicago neighborhood vs. 2008 Cook County courtroom) earns its parallel construction. Kolarich himself is one of the more credibly damaged first-person legal-thriller narrators since Scott Turow’s Sandy Stern. The reveal lands as a punch in the chest.

Recommended for fans of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent, John Grisham’s The Confession, and for anyone looking for books like The Hidden Man at the intersection of cold-case investigation and Chicago-set legal procedural. Four solid stars and one of the most underrated legal thrillers of its decade.