Within a span of six months, Gabriel Urza helped defend two murder suspects, got married, released his debut novel, and moved from Reno, Nevada, to Ithaca, New York, to begin his new job as an assistant professor of writing at Ithaca College.

To top it all off, Urza’s novel, about a political assassination in the Basque region of Spain, was named one of the best summer books of 2015 by Publishers Weekly, which also named the former public defender a writer to watch for fall 2015.

All That Followed came out August 4 and received rave reviews from the New York Times and NPR.

“Urza delineates his characters’ perspectives with remarkable care. Each shows us a different angle of the fictional world,” read the review in the New York Times.

The NPR review called All That Followed, “A rarity in fiction: a thriller with an ending that’s essentially revealed at the beginning…the reader is drawn in not because we want to find out what happened, but why it happened. And Urza's writing is so strong…that it's difficult to tear yourself away.”