Andy Barber, suburban Massachusetts assistant district attorney has been part of his community with his wife Laurie and their son Jacob for over twenty years. When the unthinkable happens, a fourteen-year-old classmate of Jacob’s is murdered, Andy, who has the reputation of being a diligent and thorough investigator and prosecutor, must now investigate friends, neighbors and Jacob’s peers. Andy is pressured by some of the community and colleagues to step down and let someone else not so close to the case take over the investigation, but Andy is adamant about continuing and is no more surprised than everyone else when his son is arrested for Ben Rifkin’s murder. As the Barbers prepare to defend and save their son, a chance Ben Rifkin’s parents never had, they begin to face things about their son no parent should have to confront and Andy’s past, a past he has kept carefully hidden from everyone, including Laurie, a past that will haunt them all for the rest of their lives.
Defending Jacob is a smart thriller that deftly weaves the story of a family in crisis, a crisis they didn’t realize they were in the midst of, with the story of parents trying to save their only son and a community trying to protect itself, though from what it doesn’t know. While Laurie is not as much in the forefront as Andy, when Andy and Laurie have conversations, it’s as if you are listening to them rather than reading dialogue. The ending of the book is very surprising and unexpected, perhaps owing to the fact that Laurie was never portrayed as completely as Andy at first. Told in the frame of a grand jury investigation, as Andy recalls events in flashback, the narrative is very effective, though the ending might have been even more effective had the last scene been switched with his final testimony.
A very well-constructed, well-written thriller that plays on so many human fears and foibles, Defending Jacob is a much richer novel than it appears to be a first glance.
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