A chilling view of the vagaries of the justice system, with a final surprise.
A debut historical novel re-creates a sensational 1964 murder trial in Lorain, Ohio, in which the author’s father was co-counsel for the defense.
Casper Bennett has been arrested for the murder of his wife, Florence, whose lifeless body he found in a bathtub of scalding water. After unsuccessfully trying to reach Ray Miraldi, who had been his lawyer for several civil matters, he hires well-known criminal attorney Lon Adams. But Adams seems to be dropping the ball, overburdened with another case. Casper’s brother, Chester, implores Ray to team up with Adams. Ray, formerly a successful city prosecutor, had resigned his position to focus full time on his private legal practice, choosing to concentrate on civil cases. The responsibility of a potential guilty verdict in a criminal case, and the consequential loss of his client’s freedom, weighs heavily on him. But, in this instance, he believes in Casper’s innocence—that Florence’s death was accidental, the result of a drunken fall —and the two attorneys agree to work together. Miraldi’s narrative is a detailed reconstruction of the investigation and the trial, with considerable attention paid to the personal backgrounds of many of the participants. Although the author is working from historical records, including his father’s files, the transcripts of the court case no longer exist. And so Miraldi, an attorney himself, imagines much of the trial. But because all of the characters (specific police officers, the district attorney and his assistant, the judge, etc.) are real, and the author includes photographs and copies of certain documents, the final product seems reportorial, more docudrama than novel. Nonetheless, this is an engrossing tale, and Miraldi carefully lays out the frailties of the criminal justice system—from dubious police procedures to prosecutorial personal agendas. He deftly describes the questioning of one witness who saw Casper the night in question: “She couldn’t say for sure, but the persistent police detectives had finally convinced her that it was very close to nine p.m. After that, they finally left her alone.”
A chilling view of the vagaries of the justice system, with a final surprise.Pub Date: June 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9989189-0-7
Page Count: 404
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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