Arvin's second novel, like his first (The Last Goodbye) is a terrific legal thriller that explores issues of race and class while telling an exciting, suspenseful story.
Thomas Dennehy is a prosecuting attorney in Nashville, preparing what looks like a slam-dunk murder prosecution against Moses Bol, a Sudanese refugee accused of killing a white woman. The killing has raised tensions even higher than usual in the neighborhood known as The Nations, whose residents are mostly poor, white, and violently racist.
One of Dennehy's earlier cases suddenly comes back to life when an activist professor claims that Dennehy convicted the wrong man, who has since been executed. If that can be proven, Dennehy and his colleagues fear that the anti-death-penalty crowd will be stirred up to such an extent that it will be impossible to get the death penalty for Bol, no matter how strong the case against him.
And that case may not be as strong as it had seemed; a local minister suddenly surfaces as Moses Bol's alibi, claiming that she was with Bol on the night of that murder. Bol is released on bail, and The Nations teeters on the edge of full-out riots.
Arvin's plotting is tight, his characters are well-rounded and realistic, and his writing is sharp and fun to read. The identity of the principal villain is fairly prepared, but comes as a surprise (it caught me off guard, anyway), and the final showdown between Dennehy and the villain is marvelously tense. This is a very fine book.
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