Occasionally a publisher will get the idea to package a series of novels. Apparently that’s what Relay Publishing did in putting a couple ghost writers together, naming their collaboration “Peter Kirkland,” and setting them to writing a series of legal thrillers called “Small Town Lawyer.” The real writers, whoever they are, are clearly competent.

The hero of Defending Innocence is Leland Monroe, who used to be a big city prosecuting attorney. But he destroyed his career when he covered up the missteps of his wife, who was an alcoholic. That lost him his job; he lost his wife to an auto accident. Now he’s moved back to his home town, Basking Rock. He’s trying to establish himself as a personal lawyer, but finding it hard to build a practice. He’s also trying to reestablish his relationship with his teenaged son, crippled in the accident that killed his mother.

Then the son’s best friend is arrested for murdering his abusive father. And Leland can’t resist volunteering to defend the boy (though he can’t afford the pro bono), both for his son’s sake and because the boy’s mother was his high school girlfriend. As in any crime story set in a small town, it soon becomes apparent that there’s considerable corruption under public façades of respectability.

I must say, although there were few surprises here, that the small town hypocrites were a little more nuanced than the usual run of such characters in novels. I thought the writing in Defending Innocence pretty good, and the characters well-developed. Opportunities to lampoon small-town Christians were not exploited much.

I did think, though, that the final showdown was kind of abrupt and too quickly resolved.

However, all in all, Defending Innocence was a decent novel.