Author: William Landay
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Hardback copy
Books I've read this year: 73
When Andy Barber goes to work on a morning in April 2007, it's a day like any other. He said goodbye to his wife, Laurie, and teenage son, Jacob, and when he arrived at the DA's office in Cambridge, Mass, he was summoned to the scene of a murder of a fourteen-year-old boy, a classmate of Jacob's, who was killed in a local park while walking to school. Barber takes on the case and targets a sex offender living near the park, but pretty soon someone else is arrested. Jacob.
The book is set up as a series of flashbacks from April 2008, when Barber has to testify in front of a grand jury. A close read shows that something strange is afoot, something more than just the murder trial, which took place in the fall of 2007. But the reader doesn't know what that something is, and why Barber is testifying, until the end of the book. That's something that bugged me for most of the book. But early on, Landay drops us a clue that kept me reading on. I can't find the page now, but Barber talks about movies like The Sixth Sense and how you think you're working in one kind of worldview until the very end, when the whole story changes and all of the pieces fall into place. Because of that line, I kept reading until the end, wondering if it was a red herring or if there was a twist. It's not a red herring. I'm not sure if it's ultimately satisfying enough to make the book a great read, but it was definitely an interesting one. For me, the most interesting part was watching Barber interact with Jacob. Until Jacob gets arrested, Barber seems fairly convinced that he's raising a normal fourteen-year-old boy. But during the trial phase, Jacob seems to be living a profoundly dysfunctional life. Did his dad ignore the facts for most of Jacob's life? Did he just not know his kid very well? Does he really believe his son is innocent?
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