COME AWAY WITH ME

A scarred man goes on trial for the death of the woman he loved in this legal thriller.

Jack Holt is standing trial for rape and murder. The victim is Maggie Navarro Stewart, a world-famous model and millionaire who was trapped in an abusive marriage to gastroenterologist Daniel Stewart. Jack and Maggie met by chance one day in a park, and she saw something in the humble warehouse worker that no one had before. Jack still bears the scars—physical and emotional—from the childhood accident that killed his father and sisters. The disfigurement to his face has mostly kept him from love—until he met Maggie, that is. Then, one day, Maggie disappeared shortly after informing Daniel she wanted a divorce. She was soon found strangled to death. Police discovered Jack’s DNA on her person, and he did not help himself by refusing to talk to them. Now, he may be facing life in prison. Jack is given a public defender, the disgraced lawyer Joe Hammer. Joe used to be a great prosecutor before he was disbarred for withholding evidence. His wife left him after the incident, and he’s since been plagued with stomach disorders and sleeping problems. Defending Jack is his shot at redemption, and he means to do it by the book. Meanwhile, a jury of conflicting personalities is assembled to rule on the case. Most are ready to convict Jack, but a few holdouts force the jury to consider the alternative. The trial will prove a roller coaster for all involved, as new facts and surprise witnesses continue to alter the shape of the case. As the trial goes on, Jack increasingly escapes into his dreams, where he and the dead Maggie discuss the events that brought them there—and whether or not he should join her in the afterlife.

Elzey makes bold choices with the novel’s structure, leaping forward and backward in time and using dream sequences to fill in much of Jack’s and Maggie’s backstories. The prose is readable, but there is a draftlike quality to it that suggests a lack of editing. Here he takes three sentences to communicate the age of one character: “When I first saw my former boss, I couldn’t believe how old he had become. The man I hadn’t seen in many years had become a withered old man. The eighty-three-year-old judge with the help of a cane stood up to greet me.” Nearly every aspect of the story displays the same heavy-handedness. The dead Maggie is idealized while Jack has a saintly disinterest in the world. Neither feels much like a real character, and their relationship will be no more believable to readers than it is to the members of the jury. Racist juror Henry Keller is a cartoon version of a bigot, taking every opportunity to offend each person he comes in contact with. The author attempts to tie up these threads in a statement about the two different Americas—one of opportunity and one of imprisonment—but it’s all a bit too soapy to make an impact.

An ambitious but melodramatic courtroom tale.