Suburban Boston. A good community. Good schools. Good
parenting. Good kids?
Eighth-grader Ben Rifkin is found dead with stab
wounds in a Newton, Mass., park by a jogger. Prosecutor Andy Barbour starts to
investigate the case and finds a likely suspect, an unregistered pedophile
living nearby. Facebook rumors by Ben’s classmates find another --- Andy’s son
Jacob.
So the top-notch prosecutor is taken off the case and
becomes a primal defender as father in Defending
Jacob, William Landay’s courtroom thriller.
Andy Barber maintains his unwavering belief in Jacob despite discovering
how little he knows about his son.
He’s not the only one. Ben’s father, Dan just can’t
understand why anyone would kill Ben: “Ben was so good. That’s the first thing. Of course no kid deserves this
anyway. I know that. But Ben really was a good boy. He was so good. And just a kid. He was fourteen years old, for God’s
sake.”
Fourteen – a perfect age for these troubled characters.
Fourteen’s an age when even “normal” kids aren’t normal, an age when parents often
haven’t caught up yet. They’re still thinking of their sons and daughters as innocent
children while the teens are discovering who they are by bullying others and
being bullied, hanging out in Facebook, and lurking about in internet chat rooms. Kids keep secrets and emergent personality traits
well hidden from their parents; the parents wouldn’t recognize Ben or Jacob from
teenage peer descriptions.
Nor, in this book, does anyone know the parents. Andy
Barber has kept an ancestral and childhood secret from his son and his wife,
Laurie, whom he met in college. The male
side of his family has a history of violence and murder. A murder gene? His
explanation for the omission -- after the first intimate disclosures of
identity when Andy told Laurie he didn’t really know his father, there was
never a good time to tell.
Furthermore, Andy’s such a good guy himself. As the
book opens he is testifying before the grand jury 14 months after the murder
because he says, he believes in the system (which he then tell us “isn’t
exactly true).” This grand jury testimony
threads throughout Andy’s narrative of the murder, Jacob’s trial and the
aftermath. The reader doesn’t know why
Andy has voluntarily taken the stand or what this investigation is about until
the final pages. All we know is he is being questioned by Neal Logiduce, a prosecutor he trained, the prosecutor who
replaced him, the man who prosecuted Jacob.
In the grand jury investigation Logiduce uses Andy’s good
graces against him: “Your honor, we all know and have fond feelings for the
defendant’s father, who is in the courtroom today. I personally have known this
man. Respected and admired him. I have great affection for this man, and
compassion, as we all do, I’m sure. Always the smartest man in the room. Things
came so easily to him. But. But.”
While the judge immediately intervenes, reminding
everyone Andy is not on trial, that’s only half true. His family has been under
siege since Jacob became a suspect.
Author Landay hones in on how quickly “our crowd,” a klatch of upper
middle class, well-educated, concerned parents, recoils from the accused’s
family. Graffiti, offensive phone calls, and a lurking individual in a car
haunt the Barbers. Grocery store outings become occasions for painful
encounters. Laurie takes it the hardest,
growing haggard, losing her circle of support, obsessively reviewing all of
Jacob’s childhood behaviors, allowing doubt to creep in.
Andy
simply doesn’t go there. “He isn’t guilty. I know my son. I love my son,” he
states and restates in as many ways as possible. He privately pursues the
pedophile, making chilling discoveries that the single-minded Logiduce has
ignored.
The
reader seesaws with the arguments from belief to disbelief, questioning, along
with the characters, arguments of nature
and nurture, the significance of DNA evidence that shows a gene for violence, and the possibility of “confirmation bias,” the
human tendency to believe what one wants to believe. The implications of such new discoveries in
genetics, neuroscience and psychology on the justice system play out in fictive
form. Ultimately the reader questions that system itself, both its basic belief
in free will and the fallibility of the way it works. Andy tells us: “Here is the dirty little
secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone
imagines… Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical
thinking, and there was no way in hell I was going to trust my son’s fate to
it.”
What’s
the reader to believe? Unconsciously, from the start we believe our
storyteller. We have little choice but to see the world as he sees it. As filter, as guide, his point of view is ours.
Like a child, we trust in him. While some
of his actions may make us cringe, we take in his explanations and accept them until
--- until we don’t.
The
rebellious reader may break away from this smart, domineering father, this experienced
pattern maker. For this reader that disillusionment happened close to the
book’s brilliant end – the final page of a series of endings.
When the grand jury testimony ultimately merges with
and takes over the main plot, what is revealed is a verbal battle between two
lawyers that has the power to destroy one or both. While references are made to Columbine, the
denouement also suggests similarities to another recent high-profile case in
which a representative of the legal system’s son was accused of murder. Perhaps
William Landay, a former district attorney himself, wondered what it would be
like to be in such a position and to get inside the head of such a character.
What
is true for this reader at least is that Landay is good. His skill with character, dialogue, family
dynamics, plot and intrigue makes Defending
Jacob a good read.
His
ending makes it even better -- what my Maine friends would call wicked good.
Why I chose this book: I grew up
in a suburb neighboring Newton, still have some connections to the area and was
intrigued by the setting.
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