Robin Peguero Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Robin Peguero is a mystery and legal thriller novelist that is best known for his debut novel “With Prejudice.” The author was born to immigrant interracial parents with a father from the Dominican Republic and an Ecuadorian mother.

The two shared the Latin culture and language even if their skin tones could not have been any more different. They met while serving in the U.S. Army and a dozen years following the ruling by the Supreme Court, they were finally allowed to marry.
Growing up, Peguero remembers the hardships the family faced living in a cramped apartment in a New York building. When his parents were fed up with the hard times in New York, they moved to Florida to try to get into the middle class.
Robin was then just five and hence spent much of his youth and childhood in Hialeah, Florida predominantly Cuban working-class neighborhood in Miami.
As a seventeen-year-old, he penned and delivered his first speech when he was named class valedictorian.

Peguero has been writing ever since he first could hold a pen in his hand and still remembers how he used to be the boy sitting with a spiral notebook at recess scribbling stories.

During his birthdays, he used to write scripts and was usually successful at corralling his friends to act them out, after which they would film it on a camcorder. In high school, he used to write at least a chapter every week featuring his close friends as the leads in his stories.

After graduating from high school, he went to Harvard College and spent summers writing for “The Miami Herald” and working as “The Harvard Crimson” editor. Following college, he was a press spokesman for Charles B. Rangel the Harlem Congressman and also wrote speeches for Amy Klobuchar the Minnesota Senator.

While studying at Harvard Law, he published three pieces on the intersection between the death penalty and jury nullification, the consequences of criminal immigration, and a piece on stop and frisk.

After he graduated from law school, he got many offers from law firms but decided to become a criminal prosecutor in Miami. Peguero would then spend seven years practicing as a trial lawyer and later on became an investigative counsel specializing in domestic terrorism.

Robin Peguero’s fascination with writing and homicides began while he was still very young. He remembers penning a college essay as part of his application in which he lamented killing off characters in his stories as he felt it was morally wrong.

His opposition to the death penalty during his teenage years would become his favorite cause, even as he ultimately discovered activism. He still remembers being depressed for weeks after he viewed a cold lifeless body on a similarly cold bench of an autopsy table.
The dead person was a twenty-six year old that had finally succumbed to her drug addiction but Pequero still hated that the pathologist treated her body like a shell. While the man was just doing his job soberly and professionally, it still made Robin sad.

During that time, he was a law student and hence it was not surprising that he would decide to spend much of his time thereafter prosecuting homicides. Later on, he would get into literature, focusing on writing about some mysterious homicides.
He has said that prosecuting homicides and writing about them was to some point therapeutic, even if he has yet to lose the visceral shock he always feels.

Working as a prosecutor and speechwriter in some ways led to him writing his debut novel. For Robin Peguero, writing has always been about telling compelling stories even when he was writing legal briefs. He always thought of his briefs like a story with an end, middle, beginning, purpose, and plot.

Robin also felt that speechwriting was no different from storytelling, even though most of the speeches he wrote were for his political clients and not his. He used to emulate his clients’ voices and it was only when he went back to college and became a prosecutor and trial attorney that he found his own voice.

As a lawyer, one needed to tell the truth or at least a close approximation of the truth which he believes is close to spinning a tale. He often had to get the jurors to picture what happened which is just what one does when crafting a novel.
However, while his days as a prosecutor and speech writer inspired him somewhat in his later career, he has said that he has been cultivating the skill ever since he was in grammar school.

Still, working as a prosecutor proved an excellent way to hone his storytelling talents even as he went in pursuit of good and justice.

Robin Peguero’s novel “With Prejudice” is the story of a straight-laced taxman named Earl Thomas who is a juror foreman in a high-stakes case in Miami. The man has had his fair share of encounters with law enforcement and this may color his perspectives.

There is also a physician named Laura Hurtado who conceals private pain in an assuming manner. Another interesting character is Joseph Cole who had been one of the founders of the neighborhood watch in his locale and seems to be too obsessed with the families around him.
There are also four other jurors from disparate walks of life and varying ages who may never have crossed paths. But now they have been brought together and are about to make one of the most critical decisions of their entire lives.

On the night that free-spirited Melina Mora was killed, she had been spotted with a man whose description matched that of Gabriel Soto. Things are even worse since in his bedroom, had been found two strands of the dead woman’s hair.

Prosecuting him is a young prosecutor named Sandy Grunwald who has political ambitions but will have to secure a conviction if she is to achieve them. She is going against preening public defender Jordan Whipple who has unearthed an explosive piece of evidence that he introduces on the eve of the trial.

What Jordan, Sandy, and Tackett the judge know is that they have to operate in a very complicated criminal justice system. They also know that everyone including the jury comes with their own story.
Ultimately it is their beliefs, biases, and experiences that will shape the verdict they will hand down.