A Calamity of Souls
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Set in the tumultuous year of 1968 in southern Virginia, a racially-charged murder case sets a duo of white and Black lawyers against a deeply unfair system as they work to defend their wrongfully-accused Black defendants in this courtroom drama from #1 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 brutally 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 the Commonwealth. 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.
Over a decade in the writing, A Calamity of Souls breathes richly imagined and detailed life into a bygone era, taking the reader through a world that will seem both foreign and familiar.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Baldacci's stirring latest (after Simply Lies) finds Black Vietnam veteran Jerome Washington on trial in 1968 Virginia for murdering Leslie and Anne Randolph, his married white employers and two of the most prominent citizens in fiercely segregated Freeman County. After washing the Randolphs' Buick, Jerome entered their house to get his weekly pay, only to find their bloody corpses on the floor. He tried to "help them out," he says, by moving them off the ground, but just as he was propping Anne up into a chair, the police arrived and placed him under arrest. Certain of his innocence, Jerome's grandmother-in-law reaches out to Jack Lee, a local white criminal defense lawyer, who agrees to take the racially charged case despite his lack of experience with murder trials. Feeling immediately out of his depth, Jack teams up with Desiree DuBose, a Black attorney at the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund; together, they work to save Jerome from the electric chair. Baldacci generates satisfying tension from Jack and Desiree's clashing personalities, and his real-life experiences both as an attorney and as a child in 1960s Virginia lend the proceedings an air of uncommon authenticity. This ranks among the author's best.
Customer Reviews
A calamity of souls
Excellent reading. Completely different to what I'm use to reading from David. This book touches on the sad but ongoing issues we have in society today, racism and prejudice.
Well done David, excellent, excellent story line.
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.