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 preeminent black fraternity at Florida’ s flagship university, is discovered hogtied in the stygian swamps of the Suwannee River, his death sets off a firestorm. And when a fellow student, Mark Towson, the president of a prominent white fraternity, is accused of the crime, the fire threatens to rage out of control.
Contending with racial unrest and a sensational media, Tow-son’ s defense attorney, Jack Swyteck, knows that the stakes could not be higher— inside or outside the courthouse. Then Jack gets a break that could turn the case. Jamal’ s murder bears disturbing similarities to a Jim Crow-era lynching. 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. Risking his own reputation, Jack plunges headfirst into the darkest recesses of the South’ s past, and its murky present, to uncover the truth.
