The truth of it all A novel

Gwen Florio, 1955-

Book - 2021

When she finally gets a breakout case involving a teenage Iraqi refugee, public defender Julia Geary throws herself into the case until she starts receiving vicious threats against her family and her client is left in a coma, pitting her against the town's most powerful forces.

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MYSTERY/Florio Gwen
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Subjects
Genres
Detective and mystery fiction
Thrillers (Fiction)
Novels
Published
New York : Crooked Lane 2021.
Language
English
Main Author
Gwen Florio, 1955- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
296 pages ; 25 cm
ISBN
9781643858579
Contents unavailable.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A beleaguered defense attorney catches a case from hell. Julia Geary is an Iraq War widow. Although she has a job as a public defender, it doesn't pay much, so she and her toddler son, Calvin, live with her mother-in-law, Beverly Sullivan, a former farm girl who prides herself on having earned a place among Duck Creek's elite. Beverly seems to blame Julia for her son's death even though enlisting was Michael's idea, not his wife's. And Julia's widowhood is a mixed bag. It makes Chief Public Defender Bill Decker loath to lay her off when times are tough, but it lands her a case no one wants: defending Muslim immigrant Sami Mohammed, a high school senior accused of raping classmate Ana Olsen during soccer practice. Once news gets out that Julia's defending Sami, her life swiftly tanks. Her personal information is spread over social media, leading angry neighbors to protest outside her house. Her son is thrown out of preschool, leaving Grandma Beverly, shunned by her bridge club, to babysit. Sami won't tell her anything, and Ana claims it was too dark to see her assailant. Although much of Julia's tale is a boilerplate litany of assaults on the righteous by the self-righteous, Florio invests her characters with enough humanity, along with touches of humility, to make it worth the read. In the end, justice is done. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.