I breezed through the novella A Trial for Grace, by Jessica Pishko (2015) in just a couple of days. It was an engaging read, a look at the life of a young legal professional who fell in love with a married man and then was sucked into his fraudulent world.
The protagonist, Claire Dunning, had to make a choice, commit to Jack and his world of scams or turn over incriminating evidence against him to the feds.
In the end, she made a sensible choice; she saved her skin and moved on.
Claire’s desire to get away from the high-paced life of New York City to a small town in North Carolina seemed the perfect setting for starting over and making amends.
However, adjusting to a new law firm, tackling death penalty cases, created a completely different life for Claire.
Her first client, Grace Delores, was found guilty of killing her child, and with her execution looming, Claire had to find some way to stop it.
When figuring out her relationship with Grace, Claire saw things like this:
The truth is the guilty make better clients: their memories are more exact, even if they are lies. The innocent are unable to explain themselves, lost in a terrible fantasy that someone else imagined for them.
Getting this truth from Pishko’s lawyer-like mind shows the author’s ability to create unpredictable complexity inside the mind of a character, which adds to believability.
I have the feeling that the richly developed characters in A Trial for Grace are not finished telling their story. This leaves me wondering if Pishko did this on purpose.
As an example, the quickness getting to the point when Claire meets her daughter makes me want to know what her childhood was like and what it means to be adopted.
The tall guy with a weather-beaten face, dressed as if for outdoor work is Henderson and the law firm’s investigator. He has figured Claire out, which draws her close to him.
What was Henderson’s “figuring out” process and why is Claire attracted to this characteristic?
What makes a story good is whether the author satisfies me with its arc, as well as leaving me with an unambiguous feeling about what really happened. I don’t just like neatly tied up endings; I love lingering questions that make good conversation among readers.
Such as, how do women on California’s Death Row think about Claire’s tenacity? Or, is Grace’s request for postcards — Stock visions of the outside world, a place no longer friendly to her — something that might really be craved by a condemned person?
For me, there are similarities in A Trial for Grace to David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, (1995), in that both stories address flaws in the criminal justice system and both offer readers realistic insight into what it means to fight for someone trapped inside the law who could be subjected to the death penalty.
In Trial for Grace, you get this perspective from a lawyer while in Snow Falling on Cedars it comes from a journalist.
Nevertheless, the common thread — that the system is flawed — is portrayed in both novels.
I would recommend A Trial for Grace mainly because of Pishko’s ability to tell a complex story from the perspective of a character who thinks about her mistakes — as well as flaws in the justice system — and who struggles with defining the degree of guilt that warrants the death penalty.
Juan’s Book Review
