Monday, September 10, 2018

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: A Death in Live Oak by James Grippando


A Death in Live Oak by James Grippando (Harper, 2018) is the 14th legal thriller featuring Miami criminal defense lawyer Jack Swyteck. Grippando has also published 11 stand-alone thrillers; he won the 2017 Harper Lee award for excellence in legal fiction.

Grippando tends to use current events as the basis of his stories and this one is no different. When the body of Jamal Cousin, president of a major black fraternity at the University of Florida, is discovered in the swamps of the Suwanee River, the local police lose no time in accusing Mark Towson, the president of a white fraternity, and his friends of the heinous crime of lynching based on a text sent to the dead student from Towson’s cell phone.

The media and the general public rush to judgment while the university hastens to expel Towson and cancel the fraternity’s campus charter in order not to seem biased in favor of the accused.

Towson’s father and Swyteck’s father are old friends, and paternal persuasion is exerted to get Jack to defend Mark. Jack’s investigation is hampered by venomous rhetoric and blatant unreasoning partisanship that quickly escalates. Race riots threaten the entire area and the fraternity house is set afire.

Nothing Swyteck does keeps Towson out of jail while awaiting trial, where he faces physical danger from the prison populace. Anxiety and alarm kick in when a second black student disappears and is feared dead in the same manner as the first.

In the meantime Swyteck’s FBI agent wife goes undercover to gather evidence on a group of white supremacists that are fomenting discord in northeastern Florida. They are believed to have incited the rioting around the fraternity house and the university. She faces down some of their aggressive members in a memorable action scene.

I was not sure I would be able to finish this book after I read the prologue, the true story of the lynching of a teenager in Live Oak in the 1940s, and then realized the rest of the story could have come from almost any newspaper in the past few years. Grippando describes the horror of the Jim Crow era and then deftly diverts the reader’s attention to something else while keeping the vicious actions of the past and present always on the periphery of the reader’s awareness.

The surprise outcome is in some ways not a surprise and is a profoundly depressing observation on the state of race relations in this country. That I found the story riveting and finished it one afternoon despite my dislike of the subject is a credit to the skill of the author. I have put the rest of his books on my TBR list.


·                     Hardcover: 384 pages
·                     Publisher: Harper (February 6, 2018)
·                     Language: English
·                     ISBN-10: 0062657801
·                     ISBN-13: 978-0062657800


Aubrey Hamilton ©2018
Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

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