Jacob's Room
Virginia Woolf
Paperback
(Independently published, Aug. 29, 2020)
When they discover the corpse of Ben Rifkin, only fourteen years old, in the middle of the forest with three stab wounds to the chest, the paradise community of Newton suddenly loses its innocence. Assistant District Attorney Andy Barber takes over a case that becomes a priority. However, when his son Jacob, Ben's classmate, is accused of the crime, Andy will not only lose his job, but will see the world he has worked so hard to build start to shake. Pressed by growing anxiety and convinced that his son has been wrongfully accused, he will dive into Facebook, interrogate the boy's classmates, confront his wife Laurie and the hell of his origins and do everything possible to find a culprit who let Jacob return to innocence and peace to his life.Defending Jacob is a masterful legal thriller in which William Landay questions the limits of a judicial system in which children are treated like adults, but at the same time, it is a superb psychological novel about paternal devotion, which poses the chilling question that no parent wants to answer: to what extent do we know our children?