“Defending Jacob” by William Landay is a
courtroom drama that hinges on the murder of a high school boy. The novel opens amid a
grand jury hearing, with Andy Barber, a former assistant district
attorney, being grilled by Neal Logiudice who happens to have been
Andy’s protégé. The questions involve whether or not Andy should have
been investigating the killing of a boy named Ben Rifkin. The case fell
into Andy’s professional bailiwick, but the victim was a classmate of
Jacob Barber, Andy’s 14-year-old son.
Landay turns out to be creating a clever blend of legal thriller and
issue-oriented family implosion. It’s possible to get almost all the
way through “Defending Jacob” without knowing whether he can pull this
off. It helps that Andy is as ignorant about Jacob as he is savvy about
courtroom theatrics. Before the murder, Andy and his wife, Laurie, just
didn’t know much about their son. These are comfortable suburban parents who think they have done all the
right things in raising their son. They’ve never needed to question that
assumption. But the way that Jacob found Ben’s body in the woods casts
suspicion on Jacob. So does the fact that Ben was a bully, using Jacob
as a frequent target. And it turns out, to Andy and Laurie’s horror,
that Jacob’s classmates have always found him a little strange. The more
they uncover about this, the more “Defending Jacob” heats up.
excerpts from NY Times review by Janet Maslin, 2/12/2012
