I'm thinking about a new novel. Here it is. My protagonist is a lawyer. Ten years past he is appointed to defend a kid in a death penalty case. The kid is adopted and has been in and out of foster care in the state of Georgia for years. So the lawyer starts looking into the kid's past and discovers that the kid's mother was also trapped in the foster care meat grinder and had landed in a slavery ring where rich guys came to get their rocks off. Turns out one of the rich guys that came to get his rocks off was the governor of a neighboring southern state. Well this governor raped this poor young girl and the result was the protagonist's client, now accused of murder and looking at a lethal injection.
To make things more interesting since the kid was born this governor has gone on to become president of the United States. Now that the kid is in the news and in jail the president is nervous he wants the kid executed. Protagonist's co-counsel is happy to play along. But the protagonist being a mouth fool isn't.
Also hovering around the scene is a shadowy professor who has control of a lousy private detective who has attached himself to the protagonist. The detective, like the professor, doesn't give a rat's ass whether the kid lives or dies. He just wants DNA samples he and the professor can use to blackmail the rapist president.
The protagonist manages to plead the kid out to life without parole and the kid sits in prison to this day.
The rapist ex-president carries out a vendetta against the protagonist to this day hatching one crazy plan after another to kill him and drugging him and having him locked away in mental institutions. He even goes so far as to torture the protagonist's mother to death. The shadowy professor just watches it all and increases his power at the protagonist's expense. I have no idea how to end it.
Update: I should also point out that somewhere in the narrative this shadowy professor is going to make a couple of attempts on the protagonists life himself and bring in another professor to cover up his own crimes for him.
One last Update: I might make this shadowy professor actually be the sort of sleaze who was working for the rapist president ten years ago. I think I'm going to have him be a big supporter of the vice president then. In that case he would have been working to screw my protagonist to cover up the rapist's crimes and to make certain the rape rooms kept churning. That seems much more truthful in a literary sense. Academia. What can you do?
And I'm not even going to get into how fond of poisons my professors are going to be.
