In Doubt by Drusilla Campbell

It’s curious what we choose for entertainment. In this blog which is mostly about crime novels, most of those novels have been about murder, and those are stories that I can enjoy and get excited about. In Doubt starts out with a shooting, but the victim, Maggie Duarte, the current Governor of California, survives. The story is darker than murder – the underlying crime is child sexual abuse by the shooter, Donny Crider. He too is a victim, of sexual abuse and the ultimate narcissistic mother. To further that theme of sexual abuse along, Campbell creates Donny’s female defense attorney Sophie Giraudo as a woman who has sympathy for Donny when no one else does, because she too was the victim of childhood sexual abuse.

The characters and plot were believable, and Campbell nurtured her story along in a reasonable way. She was not too graphic with either the shooting or the sexual events, but, the plot is just too dark for me. This taboo subject is more unsettling than murder, at least to this reader. I, for one, did not find enjoyment in this read – I just felt disturbance.