Alum's legal thrillers hit it big with Penn, Philly as backdrop

Winning praise for "sharp, intelligent, funny and hip" writing is no easy feat in a field as crowded as the legal-thriller market. But for Lisa Scottoline, a 1976 College and 1981 Law graduate and author of five novels, it's becoming routine. Her second book, Final Appeal, received an Edgar Award for best paperback in the suspense genre. Another of her books, Legal Tender, made its debut at No. 29 on The New York Times paperback bestseller list September 7. And her latest effort, Rough Justice, has just been released. But Scottoline's life has not always gone so smoothly. Then again, no good story does. In 1978, Scottoline, a young English major, decided that law school was the best way to earn a steady income. The child of a broken family, she wanted a source of income that would never make her dependent on a husband. Penn was a logical choice for a girl born and raised in Philadelphia, and there seemed little reason for her to move on when it came time to pick a law school two years later. Scottoline still loves Penn, and all her novels mention the University. Scottoline said she would love for her daughter to attend her alma mater. After living in the Quadrangle her freshman year, Scottoline moved to High Rise South. "We used to throw?," she pauses, still afraid of getting in trouble. "Once, [my roommate] threw lamb chop bones out the window." Later, in 1986 -- a great year for lawyers -- "all the [bad] things you ever dreamed of? came to pass." Left alone with a baby, Kiki, after her marriage ended, Scottoline stopped practicing law and began pursuing her childhood dream of writing. By the time she completed her first book, Scottoline had run up $38,000 in debt on a fistful of Visa cards. Living on a steady diet of M&Ms; for three years, hunting and pecking at her keyboard while Kiki slept, Scottoline completed her first work, a piece of literary fiction. When no publisher wanted it, she refused to give up and decided to try her hand at legal thrillers. "I thought, 'You know, I'm a trial lawyer, I should be able to do this'," she said. Harper Collins Publishers agreed, buying her first novel upon its completion. While her books often depict the female Italian lawyers she knows so well, the situations they find themselves in are entirely fictional, often imagined in the shower. To write a scene, Scottoline has sat in on poker groups and convinced a firing range manager to let her shoot at point-blank range -- without earplugs. And then there was the mad sprint a few years ago down Locust Walk in Doc Martens. Much to Scottoline's dismay, "No one even looked twice." When the scene appeared in Legal Tender, "students hanging out on the common gaped as we ran by," wrote Scottoline. "I bolted past them, the police sirens deafening, then took a hard right up Locust Walk." Tales of courtroom mayhem also dot Scottoline's stories. Not always drawing on imagination, Scottoline used an incident in Running from the Law in which she spilled water all over another lawyer to force a recess in a trial rapidly spiraling out of control. Scottoline, though, said she could never live the stories she writes. But she is quick to concede that if her plots played out in real life, "I would think that's about the coolest thing to do that I've ever heard of."