A Calamity of Souls by David Baldacci

 

1968, Freeman County, Virginia. Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King have all been assassinated but the Civil Rights movement has barely raised a ripple in Freeman County, Virginia, where Jack Lee, 33 years old, is making a modest living as a criminal lawyer. Although Jack grew up in a working class neighbourhood he has always accepted unquestioningly his privileged position in relation to the Black citizens of the county. He believes in the Civil Rights movement but has never thought of actively supporting it.

All of that changes when a Black woman Jack has known since he was a child asks him to help her grandson who has been accused of the murder of a wealthy white couple. Jack knows that he is no match for the blatant white prejudice against the Blacks of Freeman County and the ferocious campaigning of Governor George Wallace to nullify the gains made by the Civil Rights movement but he can’t in conscience refuse to help these desperate people.

So begins a magnificent American novel and I don’t want to give away any of the story, I want everybody to read it! This book is different to any other David Baldacci book I have read. He has based Jack’s character on his own beginnings in Richmond, Virginia. He says in his author’s note: “Where I grew up, the Black-white divide was so ingrained that despite the efforts of the Civil Rights movement and the Warren Court, life was not so very different from many decades before”. The story doesn’t flinch at describing the horrendous behaviour of people who are the products of that ingrained Black-white divide. It is a history lesson of a sort but filled with knowable, human characters. It is tense, dramatic and compulsive. 

A modern masterpiece.

Published by Pan Macmillan