MAY 20 • 2021 | 95

R

etired attorney Mark Bello of West 
Bloomfield spent his career try-
ing cases for social justice. Now 
in retirement, he has culled knowledge 
from those cases and from other social 
justice issues plucked from the headlines 
to pen and self-publish Betrayal, a series of 
legal thriller novels. His sixth book in the 
series, Supreme Betrayal is loosely based 
on the hearing and appointment of Brent 
Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. 
As a trial attorney, Bello said he witnessed 
convictions of innocent men who lacked 
the resources for a strong defense litigator. 
“Practicing law became more of a passion 
than a vocation for me and compelled me 
to challenge the system and provide a voice 
to the disenfranchised,
” he said. 
One case that has haunted Bello through 
the years is a sexual abuse and cover-up 
case involving a Detroit Catholic church 
that Bello litigated and won in the 1970s. 
Bello tried the case in civil court, which he 
won for his clients. The priests were also 
convicted in criminal court and served time 
in prison. 
When the case concluded, Bello resolved 
to someday write a book about it. Decades 

later, he self-published Betrayal of Faith
(2016), which in turn propelled him to 
write five more in the Betrayal legal thriller 
series — Justice (2017), Blue (2018), Black
(2019), Betrayal High (2020) and, released 
this April, Supreme Betrayal. 
Zachary Blake, the main protagonist in 
his books, is based on his own experiences 
growing up Jewish and practicing law in 
and around Detroit. Bello said he created 
Blake as a young man who was inspired to 
become a lawyer and pursue justice after 
listening to his grandfather’s survival stories 
from Auschwitz, chronicled in Bello’s 
novella, L
’Dor va Dor (2020). 
Bello’s readers from Metro Detroit will 
see many references to their hometown and 
surrounding suburbs, as well as references 
to Jewish life in Detroit, in all his books. 
A lifelong Detroiter, Bello grew up in a 
modern Orthodox household in Northwest 
Detroit and as a child attended Beth 
Abraham Synagogue, where his grandfather 
was a founding member. His earliest mem-
ories include congregants who did not live 
in walking distance to synagogue staying at 
their house on the High Holidays and an 
uncle breezing through the entire Haggadah 

in Hebrew at Passover seders. 
After practicing law cases, he then owned 
and managed a lawsuit funding company 
for 22 years when he began to toy with the 
notion of writing novels about the cases 
he witnessed where common citizens were 
wrongfully treated by corporations, the 
insurance industry, government or police 
enforcement, he said. 
Now, at age 69, he has seen the explosion 
of the legal thriller genre and is hoping his 
Betrayal series will find an audience start-
ing where the books are set, right here in 
Detroit or in Michigan. His novels highlight 
social issues of the day, from Black people 
being murdered by white police officers at 
routine traffic stops, a murder mystery set 
in a small northern Michigan town involv-
ing white supremacy, school shootings, and 
the rise of the candidacy and election of a 
billionaire for president. 
It was his second book, Betrayal of Justice 
— based loosely on the candidacy and 
election of Donald Trump — that inspired 
him to keep writing four successive novels 
that are fictional accounts plucked from the 
news of the day. 
“It took me 30 years between coming 
up with a novel idea, putting it down and 
working to publish it finally in 2016,
” Bello 
said. “I really thought I would only write 
one book. It was not the first novel that 
inspired me to write the second, but it was 
completing the second that inspired me to 
write the next five. 
“I discovered that with character develop-
ment and research, I was able to write about 
issues I did not have direct experiences with 
as a lawyer. There are plenty of topics in the 
news that inspire me as a writer, and I hope 
it, in turn, will inspire my readers to think 
more deeply about social justice issues.
” 

ARTS&LIFE
BOOKS

Local author tackles social justice 
issues in his novels.

Legal Thrillers

STACY GITTLEMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Mark Bello

