This is William Landay’s third novel, a well-conceived story. Andrew Barber is the assistant district attorney, the hotshot prosecutor who has handled all the hard and controversial cases in Boston for the last 20 years. His foil is the next prosecutor in line, Neil Logiudice, to whom Andy has repeatedly tried to educate on the finer points of prosecuting a case, but Neil just does not quite have the panache to learn. Andy has been in a longtime marriage to Laurie who is a wonderful woman, and she has unconflicted love for her husband and their one child, a junior high school kid, Jacob. But, Jacob is not a normal kid. Although the family seems functional, Jacob is a nerd, a geek, mostly a loner, and he has a temper. As a preschool kids, when the teachers weren’t watching, other little kids who were near Jacob would get injured. But, as Jacob got older, any evidence of ongoing difficulties was not apparent to his parents. Then, a fellow eighth grader was murdered, and Jacob quickly became the presumed guilty party, especially to Neil and the DA, but not of course to Andy and Laurie. After Jacob has been charged, Andy is forced to admit to Laurie for the first time that he lied about his family history. It’s not that he never knew his own father, it’s that his father is in jail for murder. And, his grandfather was also a convicted murderer. Had Jacob inherited the “murder gene?” Although there was some genetic matter that Neil could have tried to use, the matter never was used in court, for reasons that you’ll have to read about. The character development was excellent, and there were twists in the plot that I did not see coming. I’ll just say that this book was dark, and all well-written stories don’t have to have a happy ending. It’s a tribute to the writer that I did not anticipate the way he brought his story to a conclusion.
No comments:
Post a Comment