Matthew Strother

Gripping and Thought-Provoking!

Revisado: 07-12-21

I don’t think I’ve ever thought to put the adjectives “gripping,” “earnest,” and “erudite” together in describing a text, but that is manifestly what this (audio)book was for me: a fascinating behind-the-scenes legal drama and a searching inquiry into the meaning of the law, of justice, and of truth on earth and in the heavens above.

Burnett’s richly described account opens the closed doors of the jury room to present a facet of society that is surprisingly inaccessible and opaque, given its obvious importance.

The narrator is an academic used to living the life of the mind, professionally obliged to raise hard questions, and not to answer them. But as the foreman of a jury in a gruesome murder trial, he finds himself embroiled in a discussion in which answers cannot be endlessly deferred; a place where decisions of immense weight must be made once and for all.

Burnett’s detailed account of the trial is accompanied by an internal monologue in which we hear him grappling with abstractions—capital “R” Reason, the state, the law, the judicial system, the way we place justice in the hands of ordinary citizens—that take on strange and serious new meanings when instantiated in the high-stakes world of a murder trial.

The whole thing combines the suspense of a law procedural with the provocations of a deep and probing philosophical inquiry. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time.

And a final note: the performance was well-paced and entertaining. All around excellent.

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