Lionel Shill was a famed author who spent his whole career trying to recreate the success of his first book.
History[]
Shill had written a book when he was younger which was a great success. However, his later work was far less successful, as Detective Alexandra Eames had mentioned that his last six novels had crashed and burned and he mentions his last book had sold less than a thousand copies. As he got older, he had formed a salon for mentoring young writers such as TJ Hawkins, who wrote a memoir about being in a prison in Yemen called Throat Full of Glass and another one about his experience in a juvenille detention called American Delinquent, and Kira Danforth, who was working on a novel about her experiences working her way up from her poor neighborhood.
Self-Made[]
Shill had found Kira's work impressive and had wanted to use it for himself so he had plagerized it and was planning to release it later on. He also called in a favor from an editor at the Times and somehow got Kira to write the review for American Delinquent despite the conflict of interest. However, because Kira's boyfriend had also spent time in a juvenille detention facility and she had visited, she realizes the memoir was fiction and held off her review of the book.
Shill found out about this and realized that his mentorship would come into question. He give a line of coke to TJ and told him to kill Kira using an old gun he got from another mentee, which TJ then used to kill Kira. Detective Robert Goren and Eames then arrest Shill on conspiracy to murder Kira and with Hawkins for the murder itself. (CI: "Self-made")