Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption / Bryan Stevenson

Just Mercy is basically about a messed-up justice system that puts people on death row without due process, with these individuals frequently proven to be innocent years after their initial incarceration. The author of this nonfiction work focuses mainly on the case of Walter McMillian, an African-American wrongfully put on death row for the 1986 murder of a white woman in Alabama. The book covers a lot of other cases of injustice, and it really is a compelling read, and a shocking eye-opener to see the frequent miscarriage of justice continuing on into our day. The author makes a convincing argument linking the treatment of prisoners today to the treatment of blacks under Jim Crow laws.

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Bryan Stevenson is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). I first became aware of EJI after visiting the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice (the lynching memorial) in Montgomery, AL, on a recent trip. My daughter encouraged me to read this book after picking it up in the gift shop. The book has been a New York Times bestseller and is now a film coming out based on the main storyline about Walter McMillian, starring Jamie Foxx.

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Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

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