Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America
This is a reverse whodunit: we know who committed the crime but not—though we can guess—whether he'll be convicted. Since it takes place in 1921 Birmingham, Ala., the story's likely to involve race, gender relations, family authority, and religion, and not to be pretty. Davies, a professor of law at Ohio State, knows her way through the thickets of criminal proceedings and the ways of adversarial attorneys. She also mines trial transcripts for all they're worth. One of the defense lawyers is none other than Hugo Black, later a Supreme Court Justice but here a supporter of the Klan, which he would soon join. When all is over, the murderer, a white Protestant, goes free after killing a Catholic priest and expressing, like most in the courtroom, just about every vulgar prejudice of the day. Davies leaves almost no detail unmentioned, when a novelist's way of letting one fact stand in for many others would have made the story move more quickly. But this is an illustrative tale about its time, well worth the telling. 15 b& photos.(Feb.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.