Boston law - Sean Flynn

TV tie-in to accompany the prime-time BBC documentary on the criminal underworld of Boston, focusing on the famous Charles Stuart case.

With unparalleled access to the detectives, defendants, and prosecutors, Sean Flynn takes readers behind the closed doors of the Boston District Attorney's office to reveal the life-and-death world of crime and punishment in Boston.

This is a story not only about the city's unprecedented war on crime, now lauded as the "Boston Miracle," but also about a black man in a white man's city: a prosecutor whose father was the prime suspect in the murder of his mother.

Other stories covered include, the Charles Stuart case and the terrible warehouse fire that killed six Massachusetts firefighters in December 1999. Here are riveting stories of the policemen who have fought Boston's well-documented battles from the crime scenes to the courtrooms to the jailhouse cells.

Flynn follows detectives who should be jaded into indifference, but instead slog through their moldering cold case files to get their man. He profiles the prosecutors and defense attorneys who walk a moral tightrope between justice and compassion when dealing with children who kill.