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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