Title: The Holdout
Author: Graham Moore
Publisher: Random House
Release Date: February 18, 2020
Pages: 336
Book Source: Hardcover
“It’s the most sensational case of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Jessica Silver, heiress to a billion-dollar real estate fortune, vanishes on her way home from school, and her teacher, Bobby Nock, a twenty-five-year-old African American man, is the prime suspect. The subsequent trial taps straight into America’s most pressing preoccupations: race, class, sex, law enforcement, and the lurid sins of the rich and famous. It’s an open-and-shut case for the prosecution, and a quick conviction seems all but guaranteed—until Maya Seale, a young woman on the jury, convinced of Nock’s innocence, persuades the rest of the jurors to return the verdict of not guilty, a controversial decision that will change all their lives forever.
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Flash forward ten years. A true-crime docuseries reassembles the jury, with particular focus on Maya, now a defense attorney herself. When one of the jurors is found dead in Maya’s hotel room, all evidence points to her as the killer. Now, she must prove her own innocence—by getting to the bottom of a case that is far from closed.
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As the present-day murder investigation weaves together with the story of what really happened during their deliberation, told by each of the jurors in turn, the secrets they have all been keeping threaten to come out—with drastic consequences for all involved.” – Amazon
Kim’s Review
While The Holdout by Graham Moore wasn’t an edge of your seat thriller, it did have some good surprises at the end. And the way Moore presents the story makes one think more about the justice system, race, one way streets, and how often the rich are given special treatment. You may need to suspend your beliefs a bit, especially when it comes to how the killer of the juror is tried, although I enjoyed how it was handled.
It felt a bit like a cozy mystery to me (with a bit more grit) in regards to the way Maya starts interrogating all the people who were on the jury with her in hopes of proving herself innocent. Sure she’s an attorney, but that doesn’t mean she has in the field investigative skills.
A good read and one that I would recommend if you enjoy more of a mystery than a nail biting thriller.
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