A Death in Live Oak

From the 2017 winner of the Harper Lee Prize for legal fiction comes a powerful and timely story of race, politics, injustice, and murder as shocking and incendiary as today’s headlines. When the body of Jamal Cousin, president of the preeminent black fraternity at Florida’s flagship university, is discovered hogtied in the stygian swamps of the Suwannee River, his death sets off a firestorm. And when a fellow student, Mark Towson, the president of a prominent white fraternity, is accused of the crime, the fire threatens to rage out of control. Contending with racial unrest and a sensational media, Tow-son’s defense attorney, Jack Swyteck, knows that the stakes could not be higher—inside or outside the courthouse. Then Jack gets a break that could turn the case. Jamal’s murder bears disturbing similarities to a Jim Crow-era lynching. Are the chilling parallels purely coincidental? With a community in chaos and a young man’s life in jeopardy, Jack will use every resource to find out. Risking his own reputation, Jack plunges headfirst into the darkest recesses of the South’s past, and its murky present, to uncover the truth.