SCORCHED EARTH

Elijah Waddell is black, Clare Epps white. They love each other, which in a town like Good Hope, Virginia, is a dangerous thing. Nevertheless, they marry and have a child, born cruelly impaired. Within hours, the child dies and is buried in the cemetery of Good Hope’s 200-year-old Victory Baptist Church, the Epps family church. Hours afterward, the 13 white deacons override their pastor and vote to have the baby exhumed and reburied in a cemetery allocated to blacks. And hours after that, Victory Baptist burns to the ground. There’s only one witness, and only one suspect: Elijah Waddell. When young, clever, idealistic Nat Deeds, born and bred in Good Hope, gets a call from a judge who asks him to act as Elijah’s public defender, Nat agrees. Sympathetic to Elijah’s plight, he believes him when he maintains his innocence. But if Elijah isn’t the arsonist, who is? All Elijah can describe is a figure in the dark who set the righteous fire Elijah wanted to ignite himself. And then the case becomes fatally complicated when the corpse of a girl is discovered, beaten and raped, in the ashes: a dead girl who just happens to be the daughter of Good Hope’s racist sheriff, “hard as a headstone.” Now suddenly Nat’s defending a capital case—in a town where the summer heat suffocates, and there’s been no rain for days, and no pity.

Robbins (The End of the War, 2000, etc.) is an able storyteller, but this time out the overactive plot twists away from him.