This article contains spoilers
I love to read. It's my favorite thing to do when I am happy or sad. I love the escape it brings.
George R.R. Martin says, "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one."
This is one of the best Crime books I have read this year and I immediately fell in love with it from the first page.
"A Gambler's Jury"
The main character: When we first meet her, she is hungover and racing to get to her court appearance, wearing the same clothes from the night before. From that, I immediately thought she was not professional and didn't take her job seriously. Boy, was I wrong. Danielle Rollins tells all of her clients to call her Dani. This turns her from a high and mighty lawyer to a personable lawyer that is caring for each and every one of her clients. She is really looking out for their best interest and not trying to get money from them. Her humor combined with her compassion made my view of her do a 360.
This compassion and her son's opinion is what makes her accept a case she has an immediate bad feeling about. The case involves a black mentally challenged teenager that somehow was caught in a drug selling scenario. Although the boy seems like he would not be mentally capable of pulling off something as planned as this, the white witnesses' testimonies were stacked against him. Dani felt the odds were stacked against her when she found out the reasoning for why the case was pushed through the system so quickly that not a month after the arrest, his court was scheduled. Race played a major issue in this case and Dani tried to convince everyone to see her client for what he was (mentally disabled) not for the color of his skin.
On top of all this going on, she was dealing with her own personal issues of an ex-husband, who she still believed she loved but cheated on, was moving on with his life and had a new fiance.
The case was detailed out like a criminal case would play out in a courtroom. The author is also a criminal lawyer and stated in his author's note that his books always uses real cases with names and details changed. It's hard to believe that something like this situation would occur in the world today but when you think of the issues with race in this country, it is possible.
At the end of the trial, when the jurors were about to announce their verdict, I was laying in bed knowing I needed to go to bed but wanting to know the outcome. Surely this book had a happy ending. Surely the jury would not be swayed by the prosecution. Even though I knew the client's side, I couldn't see how the jury could believe the prosecution. You could just tell how the witnesses were using the same exact story down to the details and yet when Dani came at them with hard questions, their answers differed because none of them were prepared for that question. You could tell from the client's time on the stand that he wasn't mentally there.
Yet, I was wrong, and the jury took the side of the prosecution. I am an emotional person so there I was as tired as I could be, bawling my eyes out over a character in a book that I did not know but had grown to love from the two days I read about him.
A plot-twist at the end ended my crying and made me glad for the happy ending I was wanting.
All in all, I didn't expect this book to have the correct information when it came to court cases. But, being a criminal justice major and having a love to read court cases for fun, this book was correct in its representation of a criminal court case. This is a book that has topped my charts. Now, I want to read other books from this author
