A Calamity of Souls by David Baldacci

            I’m behind on book reviews (again? still?).  With this one, I’m skipping ahead to the book I just finished this morning.

             Set in rural Virginia in 1968, after the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the novel explores the racial tensions of the era.  It’s not light-hearted, but it is a page-turner. It opens with Jerome, a black handyman, discovering the blood-soaked bodies of the white couple who employed him.  They had been brutally stabbed to death.  Police arrive even though Jerome has not called them.  They arrest and beat him. No murder weapon is found in the room.

             Jack Lee, a white local criminal attorney who has never tried a murder case nor been involved with civil rights activity, agrees to defend Jerome.  He soon becomes a target for hate-filled threats and violence.  So does Desiree DuBose, a black civil rights attorney from Chicago who journeys to Virginia unsolicited to join the battle.  The state attorney general chooses to prosecute the case himself.  Virginia reinstitutes the death penalty, which had been paused.  An operative for presidential candidate George Wallace lurks malevolently in the background. 

             Taking us from discovery of the bodies through the trial and its aftermath, this book could be characterized as a crime who-done-it, a courtroom drama and recent historical fiction.  In his Author’s Note at the beginning of the book, Baldacci says he started it a decade before it was published in April 2024.  Having grown up in Richmond (the capital of the Confederacy) and attended school during the early days of integration, he also tells us of “autobiographical elements” in the fictional story.

             The reader is immediately drawn in and immersed in the time period. Baldacci is effective in showing how attitudes and behavior were molded by a century of history. Attention is paid not only to the civil rights issues and political assassinations of the time, but also the controversy of the Vietnam war.  Tumultuous times. 

  I was only eight years old in 1968, but I remember many of the events, including segregationist George Wallace’s presidential campaign.  Reading of George Wallace being flown around on a coal-magnate’s private plane, convincing the working class they’d gotten “a raw deal from all those high-and-mighty elites with all their fancy education” and being touted as the “only man capable of taking this country back to where it belongs” had an eerie resonance with modern times.  The defense attorney characters express hope the next generation will do better with civil rights and racial justice.  A quarter of a century ago, Jim and I thought we saw signs of that in the generation after us, but lately I’m not sure we haven’t stalled.

  This was a book club selection, my second read with a local book club.  Attendees agreed the book was well-written.  Most of our discussion centered on personal recollections of race relations.  Many members grew up in the South and recalled being students or teachers when their schools were integrated.  They talked of segregated theaters (blacks in the balcony) and how races did not intermingle socially.  I talked about starting kindergarten in 1964 in Paterson, New Jersey.  My school was always integrated, and I remember at least one black teacher.  The colored kids (as we called them then) all lived “in the Projects,” but I didn’t understand what that meant.  I recall attending at least one integrated slumber party at another white girl’s house.  I also remember hearing my grandfather and others say blacks in the South “knew their place.”  He’s the grandfather whose adult children said could have been the prototype for Archie Bunker.  Remembering and understanding that in my own adulthood is how I know racism doesn’t recognize geographic boundaries.

This is the first book I’ve read by David Baldacci.  I look forward to reading more.