By day, the author known as Leonard Ruhl presides over courtrooms in south-central Kansas as chief judge of the 30th Judicial District. By night, and whenever else he can find time, he constructs worlds where justice is far less certain.

“I’ve done the judge thing for money and the writing on the side,” Ruhl says. “I like the writing even though it’s not been very lucrative at all.”

Ruhl’s third novel, Bailing Out, follows Geronimo “G” Rivas, a cartel enforcer and assassin trying to leave the criminal life behind so that he and his wife, Carmen, with a baby on the way, can live peacefully. G finds himself running from the law on one side and his cartel on the other. In a starred review, Kirkus says the book contains “pulse-pounding action and complex characters.”

The novel—one of Kirkus’ 2025 Best of Indie books—blends crime, redemption, and empathy, themes Ruhl knows well from both sides of the bench.

Ruhl grew up in Wellington, Kansas, a small town south of Wichita, and returned home after law school to begin his legal career in 1995. He worked as a defense attorney for about a year, switched to prosecuting, and then won the position of county attorney, holding it for eight years. After a stint in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he was appointed to the district court bench in 2007. He became chief judge in 2017 and has held that post since.

Ruhl traces his interest in storytelling to an eighth-grade English assignment. “I wrote this adventure story about people on a boat with a dog,” he says. “I just loved it. You know, I was just making stuff up, and it was fun.”

Ruhl’s first attempt at a novel, which he started in law school, was “absolutely awful,” he says. “It’s under my bed. I won’t show it to anybody.” A later experiment with screenwriting, Revenge of the Parrot, wasn’t much better, he says, but he kept at it, trying to hone his craft.

Around 2016, he began working on what became his first published book, Verdict Denied. He sent the manuscript to Rob Leininger, author of Killing Suki Flood, seeking a blurb. Leininger’s response was blunt, Ruhl says: “This is terrible. Tell the judge he needs some help.”

Rather than take offense, Ruhl rewrote the book from scratch, with Leininger’s guidance. The two have stayed in touch ever since. “He’s been brutal at times, and he will get very critical,” Ruhl says. “But I like having a critical eye.”

Verdict Denied appeared in 2019, and the book’s reception encouraged him to continue. Takedown, a sequel, came out in 2023. The books, both featuring attorney Ben Joel, became known collectively as the Ruhl of Law series, a nod to both Ruhl’s legal career and his pen name, a combination of his grandfather’s first name (Leonard) and his own middle name (Ruhl).

For his third book, Bailing Out, Ruhl wanted to step away from the courtroom., although the inspiration came from a real case he encountered while working at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “This guy got pulled over in Wichita, and he was hauling, I think, 30 kilos of cocaine,” Ruhl says. When Ruhl went to the federal courthouse for the man’s first court appearance the next morning, the suspect wasn’t there. He had inadvertently been released from jail.

“I thought, ‘That poor bastard,’” Ruhl says. “‘He’s going to have a warrant out for him the rest of his life, and he’s lost so much of the cartel’s drugs.’ I just wondered, ‘Whatever happened to that guy?’”

That question became the foundation of Bailing Out.

Rather than invent a new protagonist, Ruhl revived a recurring side character from his earlier books, and though G was a minor criminal in the first two books, his struggles are front and center in Bailing Out.

Ruhl describes Bailing Out as a study in empathy and survival. “He’s born into that world,” he says of G. “He knows nothing else. He wants to get out of it, because he has a family and wants to move on, but he can’t. I just wanted readers to see how hard it is to change course when you’re swimming in those waters.”

Early in the book, readers get a glimpse of G’s dilemma—being stuck in a world he can’t escape—as he makes a drug run.

G tapped his brake, which brought the semi within a couple car lengths. Not good, but he needed the Taurus to pass so he could end the stalemate and get this trucker off his ass. He could romp on the accelerator, take the Honda up to eighty and speed past the Taurus to make way for the trucker, but he didn’t like that option. The speed limit was seventy on US 77 and, with twenty pounds of crystal meth in the trunk he wasn’t happy about, he had good reason to follow the traffic laws to a T. The whole evening had seemingly been designed to press him into situations he didn’t want to be in. He could feel his blood pressure rising and he had a headache. He was pushing forty-two and hadn’t been asked to haul a load since he was in his twenties. How could they consider tapping him for this shit after all he’d done for them? But he couldn’t think about that now. He had to keep his cool.

Despite a full schedule, Ruhl—who is married with a son and daughter—writes whenever he can; that means early in the morning, during lunch hours, or even waiting in the car at his children’s practices and games. “I’ve written in parking lots with the air conditioner running and my laptop on a portable desk,” he says. “If I get silence, I can write for six or eight hours straight and not realize I’ve done that. It’s a time warp for me.”

Ruhl outlines each novel using a traditional three-act structure, a method he learned from Robert McKee’s Story and the Gotham Writers Workshop. “Every scene has to have tension,” he says. “Somebody wants something, and something’s blocking it. At the end of the scene, the world has changed in some way that’s significant.”

The author’s influences range from Lee Child and Cormac McCarthy to noir stylist James Sallis.

Now 56, Ruhl would love to write full time, but for the moment, he’s focusing on promoting Bailing Out.

As for what’s next, he isn’t sure. “I am going to write something, and it’s probably going to be either a legal thriller or a crime thriller,” he says. “Maybe I’ll keep following G. At the end of Bailing Out, he’s walking north toward Oklahoma to get a big bag of buried money. I could pick it up from there.”

Whatever direction he chooses, the judge plans to keep writing, something he forecast at a young age. “I remember walking down Main Street with my cousin, who asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up,” Ruhl recalls. “I said I ought to be a lawyer, and I want to be a writer. Actually, I said a judge. So I’ve done both of those things.”

Alec Harvey is a writer based in Birmingham, Alabama. He’s a former president of the Society for Features Journalism.