After a teenage girl, Jessica Silver goes missing, it isn’t long before her teacher, Bobby Nock, is accused of her murder. He’s brought to trial and the evidence appears damning: The two were having a relationship with inappropriate messages exchanged between them; her DNA is found on both the passenger seat and in the boot of his car, and he lied as to his whereabouts on the night of her disappearance.
It isn’t long before he’s brought to trial and a jury is sworn in. During the trial, two jurors begin a relationship, defying the rules against such a thing. Maya Seale is an idealistic young woman while Rick Leonard is working on a PhD in urban planning. They are falling in love. Until that is, it comes to the deliberation. For then they discover they’re on opposing sides. Everyone agrees that Bobby Nock is guilty, except for Maya who believes there’s reasonable doubt. As the holdout on the jury, she argues her case and slowly exhausts everyone to come over to her side. It’s the right thing to do perhaps, but a Pyrrhic victory as far as her personal life is concerned, for it destroys her relationship with Rick.
Years later Maya is a successful lawyer, while Rick has spent his years trying to prove that Bobby Nock was guilty and that Maya made a terrible mistake. He approaches her outside of court saying that a documentary team wishes to reenact the trial and that he has new evidence that will prove Nock’s guilt once and for all. She reluctantly takes part and one of the jurors is murdered, Maya becoming the prime suspect.
This novel is told in intervening timelines, the original trial of Bobby Nock and the arguments and deliberations in the jury room, and the present day where Maya is trying to prove her innocence, something that forces her to reinvestigate the original case. It’s all handled with aplomb and self-assurance. But personally, this book just didn’t come alive for me. It’s become something of a sensation, with a Netflix series adaptation in the works, but for me, it just lacked a certain magic.
As a British reader, what I did find interesting were the differences between US law and procedure (in this case that of the state of California) and the UK. The fallout of the case is such, with Bobby Nock having been tried in the court of public opinion, that the not guilty verdict has real ramifications for the jurors. This is something that doesn’t happen in the UK, as contempt of court legislation means that there are reporting restrictions on what can be reported during a trial. Furthermore, it is illegal to report the goings-on and deliberations that take place within juries in the UK. So members of UK juries are never subjected to this kind of scrutiny and criticism.
Another striking difference was the treatment of sex offenders. Apparently, in California, someone on the sex offenders register has to literally knock on all the doors in the neighbourhood to announce his or her presence when they move into an area. What this leads to is sex offenders being ostracised and banished from society and setting up their own little communities. There are trailers parks consisting entirely of sex offenders. Now, sex offenders are not a sympathetic constituency, and I’m not suggesting that people should feel sorry for them. That said, you don’t need to be the caricature of a bleeding heart liberal to see this as akin to something from the middle ages, and imagine that it does more harm than good. Surely these people need to be treated and monitored, rather than left to their own devices in makeshift ghettoes?
These elements, fascinating though they may be to a British reader, make up just a small fraction of the book, and the novel is in the main a legal thriller akin to something that John Grisham might write. In my opinion, it’s a good book, but not great, though if you’re a fan of the genre you might like it more than I did.
3 out of 5 stars
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