A Savvy Prosecutor, but Clueless About His Son (Published 2012) (2024)

There are two types of suspense that run through “Defending Jacob,” a courtroom drama that hinges on the murder of a high school boy. The first comes from trying to guess who killed him. The second comes from wondering whether this book’s author, William Landay, a former district attorney with two well-received novels behind him, has developed the chops to catapult himself into the Scott Turow tier of legal-eagle blockbuster writers. The jury stays out until this book’s very last words.

The initial setup is tricky but promising. “Defending Jacob” opens amid a grand jury hearing, with Andy Barber, a former assistant district attorney, being grilled by Neal Logiudice who happens to have been Andy’s protégé. The questions involve whether or not Andy should have been investigating the killing of a boy named Ben Rifkin. The case fell into Andy’s professional bailiwick, but the victim was a classmate of Jacob Barber, Andy’s 14-year-old son.

Right from the get-go, there is reason to worry about what Mr. Landay is up to. What exactly is the grand jury investigating? Is this — please, no — a tired old story in which the innocent narrator is wrongly accused of murder? Is Andy in trouble for having violated professional ethics by taking the case? Has he abetted Jacob in committing a crime? Is this book headed anywhere interesting? The short answers are no; no; no; and you’d better keep reading.

Mr. Landay turns out to be creating a clever blend of legal thriller and issue-oriented family implosion. It’s possible to get almost all the way through “Defending Jacob” without knowing whether he can pull this off. It helps that Andy is as ignorant about Jacob as he is savvy about courtroom theatrics. Before the murder, Andy and his wife, Laurie, just didn’t know much about their son.

These are comfortable suburban parents who think they have done all the right things in raising their son. They’ve never needed to question that assumption. But the way that Jacob found Ben’s body in the woods casts suspicion on Jacob. So does the fact that Ben was a bully, using Jacob as a frequent target. And it turns out, to Andy and Laurie’s horror, that Jacob’s classmates have always found him a little strange. The more they uncover about this, the more “Defending Jacob” heats up.

Mr. Landay delves simultaneously into Jacob’s character and Andy’s professionalism. Andy was quick to assume that a sex offender living in the neighborhood was the prime suspect; now, on the witness stand, he has to defend that illogical leap. Meanwhile Andy discovers Facebook, “still largely a kids’ paradise” in 2007, when the crime was committed, and finds out what other students say about his son. “Jake, everyone knows you did it,” reads a sample posting. “You have a knife. I’ve seen it.”

Sounding ever more like Mr. Turow in “Presumed Innocent,” Mr. Landay writes: “Suspicion, once it started to corkscrew into my thoughts, made me experience everything twice: as a questing prosecutor and anxious father, one after the truth, the other terrified of it.” He cannot help relentlessly digging into this story and dreading what he will find.

Mr. Landay makes good use of the way Jacob is totally uncommunicative, even when he speaks. When Andy finds that knife in Jacob’s room and knows it might be the murder weapon, here’s how Jake explains having it: “I just thought it was kinda cool. I liked it. I just wanted it.” Why did he show the knife to other kids? “It was like, Hey, check this out.” This boy is going to have trouble defending himself if it comes to that. And in a book called “Defending Jacob,” rest assured that it does.

Along the way to the courtroom, Andy is forced to cough up an unfortunate fact: He comes from a line of murderers who were handy with knives. He never told Laurie about that and not because this is — please, no — a thriller of the threadbare Terrible Secret variety. “There is a more mundane explanation too,” he tells the reader: “It just never came up. It turns out there is no good time in the average day to announce to your wife that you are the son of a murderer.”

Mr. Landay details the way suspicion erodes Andy and Laurie’s marriage, but even this is given some drama. When Andy speaks about Laurie in the past tense, he raises questions about what has happened to her. Midway through the book she begins looking old and disheveled, and the spark between them disappears. In a book that raises so many questions, Laurie’s well-being becomes one of them.

When psychiatric evaluations begin to explain Jacob to his parents, tensions increase. And Mr. Landay uses his own courtroom expertise to jangle even more nerves. “Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking,” Andy says about the law, “and there was no way in hell I was going to trust my son’s fate to it.” But when Jacob’s fate is out of his father’s hands, Andy’s skeptical evaluation of legal maneuvering keeps this story from going slack.

There’s no mistaking this novel’s trial scenes for the work of anyone but a lawyer. Mr. Landay pays a lot of attention to tactics, both legal and dramatic ones. He cites a three-word trial mantra that is unprintable here but useful for any prosecutor. And he gets an extra frisson out of the way that Andy, as Neal’s former teacher, knows this prosecutor inside out. “He would get up in front of the jury box shaking his head and pursing his lips like a schoolmarm or priest,” Andy recalls, “and in every juror there stirred a secret desire to vote against him.”

In a less ingenious book that might foreshadow something. But in this one, nothing is predictable. All bets are off.