Unshackled, released on February 4, 2025, is a legal thriller about incarcerated women and the importance of them being reunited with their children. It’s the third book in my award-winning Camille Delaney series.
The first two novels in the series, The Complication (published in 2022) and Deliver Them From Evil (2023) were originally written 20 years ago! I dusted them off and worked on getting them published during COVID; we all had those “pandemic projects” and the Camille Delaney series was mine.
Back when I wrote those novels, I had just stepped away from a legal practice in the area of medical negligence. I saw firsthand that insurance companies, and the legal system, too often minimized the value of a human life. It drove me crazy and my internal value system couldn’t stand it. So I quit, started my own family law practice in Seattle in the late 1980s, and wrote those two books to try and educate readers about injustices in the legal system that needed to be exposed.
Unshackled is different in that I wrote it very recently, and it reflects an amazing turn in my life as a lawyer and social justice warrior. This novel is centered on incarcerated women and the societal impacts of separating them from their children, which stems from my experience founding an organization that teaches formerly incarcerated people how to engage in the political process and change laws that create barriers for them upon reentry. Through that work, I’ve met and become close friends with some of the bravest people I know. Many of them are mothers.
According to The Sentencing Project, the number of incarcerated women increased by more than 585% between 1980 and 2022. Isn’t that astounding? And sadly, children with incarcerated mothers face a multitude of hardships, including coping with trauma, lower grades, social stigma, and more, which all adds up to an increased chance of them winding up in prison, too.
Seeing how important reunification is for a family and ultimately, a community, motivated me to send my protagonist, Camille Delaney, into the women’s prison to work for justice for incarcerated moms. When I had a full draft of Unshackled, I was privileged to have several friends who are formerly and currently incarcerated mothers review it for feedback on how being a mother inside prison was portrayed. It was critical to me that this book be well received and championed by the women who saw themselves in these pages.
Unshackled, and the entire Camille Delaney series, serve a dual purpose: entertainment and education. The compelling stories take the reader through the expected twists and turns of a good page-turner. But under that is the desire to illustrate some injustice in the legal system.
Amanda DuBois is the founder and managing partner of DuBois Levias Law Group, a woman-owned boutique family law firm in Seattle, Wash. Prior to becoming a lawyer, Amanda was a labor and delivery nurse; she combines her medical and legal knowledge as the author of the Camille Delaney mystery series, which addresses inequities in the legal system. All Camille Delaney book proceeds benefit organizations and individuals working to empower people whose lives have been impacted by the criminal legal system.
