THE TRUTH OF IT ALL

A beleaguered defense attorney catches a case from hell.

Julia Geary is an Iraq War widow. Although she has a job as a public defender, it doesn’t pay much, so she and her toddler son, Calvin, live with her mother-in-law, Beverly Sullivan, a former farm girl who prides herself on having earned a place among Duck Creek’s elite. Beverly seems to blame Julia for her son’s death even though enlisting was Michael’s idea, not his wife’s. And Julia’s widowhood is a mixed bag. It makes Chief Public Defender Bill Decker loath to lay her off when times are tough, but it lands her a case no one wants: defending Muslim immigrant Sami Mohammed, a high school senior accused of raping classmate Ana Olsen during soccer practice. Once news gets out that Julia’s defending Sami, her life swiftly tanks. Her personal information is spread over social media, leading angry neighbors to protest outside her house. Her son is thrown out of preschool, leaving Grandma Beverly, shunned by her bridge club, to babysit. Sami won’t tell her anything, and Ana claims it was too dark to see her assailant. Although much of Julia’s tale is a boilerplate litany of assaults on the righteous by the self-righteous, Florio invests her characters with enough humanity, along with touches of humility, to make it worth the read.

In the end, justice is done.