Kia ora and welcome to the Reading Doctor! Each week, literary critic and devoted reader Dr Louise recommends books to us on a particular theme, or responds to reader questions. Send us your questions for her by emailing: communications@read-nz.org

This week she recommends novels that explore contests of power in courtrooms.

Courtroom drama

This week’s decision by the United States Supreme Court that a woman does not have the constitutional right to control her own body reminds us that legal verdicts affect not just the individuals involved in a particular case, but have wider ramifications, shaping the principles which underlie society. These novels are focussed on the contests of power, truth and narrative which occur in courtrooms, in which the machinations of both parties to a case – legal, psychological, political – suggest that their outcomes rely less on fairness and justice than one might hope.

· A failed writer watches his elderly father defend the indefensible as the lawyer for a fundamentalist Christian woman who neglected the young adoptee in her care, in David Guterson’s novel The Case.

· The court scene is a dramatic high point which reveals much of the mystery, in the highly structured, richly-layered and symbolic novel The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton.

· Atticus Finch does what’s right and unpopular in defending a falsely accused black man in the American South, in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

· A High Court judge agonises over the life-changing decisions she must make in her courtroom, in Ian McEwan’s The Children Act.

· A widow bereaved by her husband’s death from lung cancer brings a case against a tobacco company in The Runaway Jury by John Grisham, during which a planted juror connives to derail proceedings.

· An assistant district attorney grapples with the possibility that his teenage son is guilty of murder, during a trial which makes him re-evaluate everything he thought he knew, in William Landay’s Defending Jacob.

· Written while the events it describes were unfolding in the real world, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote is a true crime book detailing the murders of the four members of the Clutter family and the subsequent trial, conviction and execution of their two murderers.

· A young Amish woman is tried in Pennsylvania on the charge of murdering her newborn baby in Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult, defended by a woman from the very different world of a high-powered Philadelphia law firm.

· Capturing the essence of New York in the 1980s, Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe is centred on the wealthy white bond trader trying to get away with the hit and run murder of a young black man.

· Published posthumously and against his wishes, The Trial by Franz Kafka describes the experience of Josef K, arrested on unspecified charges by an unknown accuser within a faceless, inhumane system which resists being held to account.

· After taking extreme measures to save the life of a new baby, Sibyl is accused of killing the mother during a trial recounted by her 14-year-old daughter, in Midwives by Chris Bohjalian.