Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Devil in the Grove, a gripping story of sex, race, class, corruption, and the arc of justice twisted and bent straight again in the Florida citrus groves.

In January 1957, which brings a rare killing freeze to Florida's orange groves, Blanche Bosanquet Knowles, the wealthy young wife of a citrus baron, is raped in her home while her husband is away. She says a "husky Negro" did it, and Lake County's infamously racist sheriff, Willis McCall, has no hesitation in rounding up a herd of suspects matching that description, alibis be damned. But within days, they are released, and instead the crime is pinned on Jesse Daniels, a slight white nineteen-year-old with the mental capacity of a six-year-old. His uneducated parents' every attempt to secure him competent legal representation fails, and he is packed up north to the Florida State Hospital for the Insane in Chattahoochee, where he will languish for more than thirteen years.

But facts are stubborn things, especially in the hands of a crusading journalist named Mabel Norris Reese, a heroine of Devil in the Grove. She recruits to the cause an inexperienced young lawyer named Richard Graham, who learns quickly from his fearless mentor. Together they dig deep into the case, winning unlikely allies, unearthing the shameful truths buried beneath its confounding contradictions, and slowly, relentlessly, bending the arc of history at long last back toward justice.

Powerful, page-turning, and rippling with the tensions that still fracture our own times, Beneath a Ruthless Sun will be devoured by Gilbert King's many fans and will win him many, many new ones.