Jack Swyteck
Harper
October 2018
On Sale: September 25, 2018
496 pages ISBN: 006265781X EAN: 9780062657817 Kindle: B071HD86BQ Mass Market Paperback / e-Book (reprint) Add to Wish List
From the 2017 winner of the Harper Lee Prize for
legal fiction comes a powerful and timely story of race,
politics, injustice, and murder as shocking and incendiary
as today's headlines.
When the body of Jamal Cousin, president of the pre-eminent
black fraternity at the Florida's flagship university, is
discovered hogtied in the Stygian water swamps of the
Suwanee River Valley, the death sets off a firestorm that
threatens to rage out of control when a fellow student, Mark
Towson, the president of a prominent white fraternity, is
accused of the crime.
Contending with rising political tensions, racial unrest,
and a sensational media, Towson's defense attorney, Jack
Swyteck, knows that the stakes could not be higher—inside or
outside the old Suwanee County Couthouse. The evidence
against his client, which includes a threatening text
message referencing "strange fruit" on the river, seems
overwhelming. Then Jack gets a break that could turn the
case. Jamal's gruesome murder bears disturbing similarities
to another lynching that occurred back in the Jim Crow days
of 1944. Are the chilling parallels purely coincidental?
With a community in chaos and a young man's life in
jeopardy, Jack will use every resource to find out.
As he navigates each twist and turn of the search, Jack
becomes increasingly convinced that his client may himself
be the victim of a criminal plan more sinister than the case
presented by the state attorney. Risking his own reputation,
this principled man who has devoted his life to the law
plunges headfirst into the darkest recesses of the South's
past, and its murky present, to uncover answers.
For Jack, it's about the truth. Traversing time, from the
days of strict segregation to the present, he'll find it—no
matter what the cost—and bring much-needed justice to
Suwanee County.