I KILLED SAM

A debut courtroom novel focuses on a murder case based on a true story.

Bob Nichols, the narrator of Steadman’s book, opens this tale while sitting on his deck in Flint, Michigan, in 1987. He’s thinking back to the case that made his career back in October 1956, when his old high school sweetheart, Betty, walked into the offices of his fledgling law practice in the town of Darien with a horrifying confession: She killed her husband, Sam Waterman. Nichols had been on the same football team as Sam when they were younger, and he was extremely familiar with the rocky state of Betty’s marriage. Sam “had brutalized her during the last three years of their marriage,” he recalls, “with the full knowledge and support of his dad, Ira.” Fearing for her own life and the safety of her little daughter, Betty had drawn a shotgun from underneath Sam’s bed and shot him dead while he slept. Nichols knew instantly that he had a “cause” case on his hands—and also an uphill battle to make the argument that Betty was acting in self-defense even though her victim was asleep when she killed him. As the trial got under way and the witnesses and publicity began turning Betty’s already unhappy life upside down, tender feelings began to rekindle between Nichols and his client. Steadman, who was the defense attorney in the real-world trial, works all of these elements into a narrative that positively crackles with authenticity. Through his main character’s reflections on events in Darien, Steadman captures perfectly many of the aspects of small-town living, where everybody went to the same high school and knows one another’s business. And through the slow, step-by-step dramatization of the trial, the author wonderfully elicits the workaday, real-world lessons of a career in the law. Steadman deftly escalates the drama both inside and outside the courtroom, and the display of his legal skills in the former setting neatly counterbalances the simple sweetness of how he handles the latter.

An effective and engaging legal tale about the trial of an abused wife.