Legal thriller

Defending Jacob

by William Landay

Assistant district attorney Andy Barber is investigating the murder of a boy in his Massachusetts community when evidence points toward his fourteen-year-old son, Jacob. Andy's confidence in both the justice system and his child's innocence isolates him from neighbors and strains his marriage to Laurie. Family history, unsettling behavior, and competing interpretations of the evidence make the trial only one part of a deeper question about what parents can know and what loyalty asks them to deny. Dark and psychologically tense, this legal novel suits readers who enjoy family secrets, juvenile cases, courtroom suspense, unreliable certainty, and stories where acquittal cannot restore the life suspicion destroyed.