A Calamity of Souls
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3.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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'This is David Baldacci at his best' - Michael Connelly
'I couldn’t stop turning the pages, fascinated, moved, horrified' – Alex Michaelides
'A Tour de Force' – S.A. Cosby
'May be the best novel David Baldacci has ever written' - Scott Turow
'A tale of high tension, false assumptions and stubborn humanity' - Stacey Abrams
Set in the tumultuous year of 1968 in southern Virginia, a murder case sets a duo of Black and white lawyers against a deeply unfair system as they work to defend their wrongfully-accused Black defendants in this courtroom drama from the number one bestselling author David Baldacci.
Jack Lee is a white lawyer from Freeman County, Virginia, who has never done anything to push back against racism, until he decides to represent Jerome Washington, a Black man charged with killing an elderly and wealthy white couple. Doubting his decision, Lee fears that his legal skills may not be enough to prevail in a case where the odds are already stacked against both him and his client. And he quickly finds himself out of his depth when he realizes that what is at stake is far greater than the outcome of a murder trial.
Desiree DuBose is a Black lawyer from Chicago who has devoted her life to furthering the causes of justice and equality for everyone. She comes to Freeman County and enters a fractious and unwieldy partnership with Lee in a legal battle against the best prosecutor in town. Yet DuBose is also aware that powerful outside forces are at work to blunt the victories achieved by the Civil Rights era.
Lee and DuBose could not be more dissimilar. On their own, neither one can stop the prosecution’s deliberate march towards a guilty verdict and the electric chair. But together, the pair fight for what once seemed impossible: a chance for a fair trial and true justice.
Customer Reviews
Déjà vu
The author is an American lawyer turned writer of bestselling thrillers.
Unlike most of Mr B’s oeuvre, which employs a contemporary setting, this book is set in the American South in the 1960s. He states in the prologue that it has had a long gestation. He was born in 1960 and grew up in small town Virginia. Jim Crow was officially over, but in practical terms, nothing much had changed. The book is based on his experience as a white middle class kid of the era, and relatively late awakening to the pervasiveness of racial injustice. (Brown versus Board of Education was enacted in 1954, but he did not attend an integrated school until he was in the eighth grade, almost 20 years later.)
The plot is a familiar one. A black man is falsely charged with the murders of an elderly white couple. A young white male lawyer agrees to defend him, reluctantly at first. Justice prevails despite ingrained racial prejudice. Harper Lee used it in ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ (1960), which was set in mid-1930s small town Alabama. John Grisham recycled it for “A Time To Kill’ (1989), which was set in small town Mississippi in the early 1980s.
The prose is up to Mr B’s usual standard, if a little sanctimonious at times, but I don’t understand why he felt the need to reinvent the wheel. (His lawyer protagonist’s name is Jack. Grisham’s is Jake, which sounds more like a retread than a brand new tyre. Neither’s a patch on Atticus.) Perhaps if I’d grown in the American South and now lived in the woke world of American arts and letters, I’d feel the need to perform some sort of penance too.
Judging by the high ratings on ‘Goodreads’ and elsewhere, my opinion is a minority view.