He's Just Hiding: Some fans of The Testament wonder if Rachel may have faked her offscreen death from malaria to avoid dealing with her unwanted inheritance.
Recurring character Lucian Wilbanks is an unhappily disbarred civil rights advocate, and decent Mentor Archetype, but he's also a bit of a fiery personality who (as shown in The Last Juror) wasn't above representing a rapist whose family did a lot of cheating in his various trials and parole hearings.
Patrick's partners in the The Partner. They were involved in a highly corrupt scheme (using inside information to fake having information for a lucrative whistleblower reward), planned to cheat Patrick out of his share, and are pretty vindictive in general, but seeing how much their lives have imploded over the years (and their Yank the Dog's Chain moment before being exposed by Patrick and arrested) can make them a bit pitiable.
Libigail, one of Troy's children in The Testament, while she does have some greedy and Jerkass moments, she comes out a little more sympathetically than the other heirs but still gets run through the ringer with the others. She was one the closest of his children until he started ignoring her due to his interest in his new children and (based on a throwaway line) disowned her for marrying a black man. She's been in and out of rehab (and is struggling to stay clean) and bad relationships several times and is living the least well out of Trey's relatives.
Nate, the main character of The Testament has been a bad parent and a mean drunk but is painfully aware of this, has limited success in trying to make up for this, gets sick with malaria and has the character he bonds with most in the book dies.
Snead from The Testament is a somewhat greedy man whose does some shady things as the Phelan family gofer and is willing to perjure himself for money, but spent decades devoting himself solely to the family with no life outdid of that job, only to be mistreated, unappreciated and written out of the will after making a genuine effort to try and stop Tory form jumping and seeing him hit the ground.
Joey in "The Confession", who contorted to Donte's arrest and execution with a lie told out of jealousy, and drags his feet about telling the truth. Nonetheless, he is portrayed as genuinely horrified and troubled when Donte actually dies after he did tell the truth (just too late), has some troubled family relationships, and the epilogue notes he spends the rest of his life a rootless drunk.
Seth and his brother Ancil in "Sycamore Row", both of them had dysfunctional family relationships and mild shadiness to them but are shown to have been badly scarred by witnessing A Klan lynching as children.
Gerald Cook in "The Guardians" is an abrasive man who freely admits to violent thoughts but he was (probably) framed for molesting his stepdaughters just so his wife could get his money, and he finds himself rejected by the lawyers who could be able to prove his innocence.
Troy Phelan from The Testament. A rich businessman with over 11 billion dollars in assets as well as three ex-wives and six children he hates with a passion, he cooks up an ingenious plan to totally screw them when he dies. He first fools his heirs into thinking he signed a will that divided the money equally among them. Then, while they're not looking, he signs the real will. In it, he gives his entire fortune to an illegitimate daughter. He only gives enough money to his heirs to cover all of their debts up to the date of his death, orders his lawyer to keep the will from being publicly read for a month, and then commits suicide. The lawyer then realizes that, thinking they're going to inherit a fortune, all of Phelan's heirs will go on a spending spree for the next month and incur even greater debts. The icing on this cake? Shortly before committing suicide, he manipulates his family into getting a team of doctors to declare him mentally competent, knowing that they'll try to backpedal furiously when the real will is read.
Malcolm Bannister, protagonist of The Racketeer belongs here as well. A wrongfully convicted lawyer, his story starts with him having served five of his ten year prison sentence and nursing a nasty grudge against the FBI and federal government. When a high profile murder of a judge occurs, he claims to know the killer and offers information to the FBI in exchange for early release and admittance to the Witness Protection Program. After he gets out, he executes an incredibly well-planned and complex Batman Gambit to secure not only his own freedom, but millions of dollars in gold as well.
In The Runaway Jury,"Nicholas Easter" and his lover "Marlee", real names Jeff Ker and Gabrielle Brant, are a pair of mysterious figures seeking to influence the outcome of a lawsuit against a tobacco company. Nicholas gets selected for jury duty and sets himself up as a leader and friend to most of the other jurors while subtly influencing their opinions about key aspects of the case. Marlee, in the meantime, negotiates with the crooked jury consultant for the tobacco company, offering to sell the verdict while undermining his other efforts to blackmail or sabotage several jurors. While nice for the most part, they're willing to drug one of Nicholas's fellow jurors and make another afraid that she's being stalked to get them taken off the jury. In the end, it's revealed that the two are out to get a ruling against the tobacco company—along with massive punitive damages—in revenge for the deaths of Marlee's parents from lung cancer. They even return the tobacco company's bribe, although only after making a fortune by using it for investments. Expressing pride in what they've accomplished, they vow to take further action if the tobacco company goes too far in appealing the verdict.
