{"id":3064,"date":"2014-10-21T07:41:38","date_gmt":"2014-10-21T11:41:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3064"},"modified":"2015-01-04T06:39:32","modified_gmt":"2015-01-04T11:39:32","slug":"10-21-14-sandrines-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3064","title":{"rendered":"****Sandrine\u2019s Case"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sandrine's<\/a>By Thomas H. Cook<\/strong> & narrated by Brian Holsopple<\/strong>. This psychological suspense novel provides a day-by-day recounting of the capital trial of Professor Samuel Madison, accused of the murder of his wife Sandrine. A first-person narration, Madison tells the reader up-front that he did kill her, which gives the author a tall mountain to scale in order to make this protagonist likeable, so he doesn\u2019t try. The prosecutor, the police, his defense lawyer, possibly even Sandrine herself, and certainly the reader decide Sam is \u201cone cold fish.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sam and Sandrine are erudite college professors at a second-rate college in a small Georgia town. He claims her death from too much alcohol and too many pills was suicide; the police and prosecutor think otherwise. He calls a note found by her deathbed a \u201csuicide note,\u201d but hasn\u2019t read it. It turns out to be about her academic work, about Cleopatra, and when the police detective refers to \u201cthe Egyptian Queen,\u201d Sam\u2014instead of behaving like a recently bereaved husband, confronted with his dead wife\u2019s last words\u2014says, \u201cCleopatra was not Egyptian.\u201d She was Greek, evidently. This and similar pedantics show how intellectually superior he feels to the authorities and the jury, an intellectual condescension that puts him, as he slowly realizes, in considerable risk of his life.<\/p>\n

At first, the day in court punctuated by Sam\u2019s lengthy flashbacks to his and Sandrine\u2019s life together seemed awkwardly handled, though I got used to it. For the middle third of the book, I thought \u201ctoo much Gone Girl<\/em>,\u201d but other readers will have to decide that for themselves. In a way, this book might not have worked if Gone Girl<\/em> hadn\u2019t preceded it. I can\u2019t be sure, because I can\u2019t unread those pages.<\/p>\n

The plot is nevertheless intriguing and ends up in an interesting place. The characters\u2014especially Madison\u2019s attorney and several minor characters\u2014are people the reader can imagine breathing real Georgia air. Not so much Sandrine and the daughter Alexandria, but that\u2019s the thing with a first-person narration\u2014is may just be that Madison\u2019s view of them is not quite in focus, either. Holsopple does an excellent narration of most of the characters, especially the relentless prosecutor, but the venomous way his Alexandria spits out the word \u201cDad\u201d in nearly every line of her dialog became like the jabbing bite of Cleopatra\u2019s asp.
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