To Account for Murder

Loss haunts Charlie Cahill. He has lost his belief in the great game of the law, a game that is fixed from the beginning. He lost his father, who drowned during Prohibition, smuggling whiskey across the Detroit River. He lost his left arm below the elbow to German machine-gun fire on D-Day. And he may lose the one thing that still matters to him, the woman who rescued him from his own despair.

That woman is Sarah Maynard. She has chestnut hair with a single white streak, a wicked laugh, a thirst for love, and a corrupt state senator for a husband. With a probe into corruption at the state capital about to begin, the police find the Senator Dead in the middle of a cornfield. Cahill is not surprised. As he says in the opening chapter, "I knew nothing about an investigation. But I knew all about the senator. After all, I'd shot him."

Set in post-war Michigan, the book's shattering climax takes place at Jackson State Penitentiary --"Jacktown"--the world's largest walled prison. There, Cahill must choose between saving Sarah Maynard and his own conscience.

Following the fiftieth anniversary of Anatomy of a Murder, another Michigan jurist has written a deeply layered courtroom drama about murder, sex, corruption, and politics. At one level this is simply a story out of the past about the killing of a state senator. At another level it's about loss and its consequences. But it is also about truth, deception, and the swirling shades of gray that lie between the two. Ultimately, it is about identity and a terrible secret kept in silence across the decades.