Stacey Abrams wrote a legal thriller and we've got all the exclusive details

We already know that Stacey Abrams is one of (if not the) hardest-working and most inspiring people in America, but her list of accomplishments is about to get even longer. While she spent most of the last year — along with her team at Fair Fight and countless other organizers — getting out the vote in her home state of Georgia, re-enfranchising communities, and basically saving democracy, she also wrote a new novel.

Abrams is not new to the publishing world, of course: in addition to her bestselling nonfiction tomes Our Time Is Now and Lead From the Outside, she's penned eight romance novels under the pen name Selena Montgomery. "Before they became ministers, my mother was a librarian and my dad was an avid storyteller," she tells EW. "So my five siblings and I became voracious readers. Storytelling has always been a part of who I am. "

But her latest, While Justice Sleeps, enters a new territory for her: It's a breakneck legal thriller. It follows Avery Keene, a law clerk in Washington, D.C. who finds herself involved in a controversial court case — surrounding an American biotech company and an Indian genetics firm — and a potential conspiracy that reaches to the deepest levels of the government. "I am excited to step into the world of legal suspense novels and political thrillers with While Justice Sleeps," Abrams says. "The tensions of politics and power are the core of this story — people scrambling for leverage and desperate to win. And having been a young lawyer myself once, I explore what it means to have authority but no real power. How do you navigate those spaces when there is work to be done and you're it?"

The novel doesn't hit shelves until May 11, but EW is exclusively revealing the eye-catching cover right now, which you can check out below.

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