{"id":9217,"date":"2021-09-07T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-07T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9217"},"modified":"2021-09-07T09:46:13","modified_gmt":"2021-09-07T13:46:13","slug":"false-witness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9217","title":{"rendered":"False Witness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The standalone thriller begins in the summer of 1998, with the uneasy relationship between Callie and Buddy, which, for his part, seems to revolve solely around sex, rough sex, and keeping his ten-year-old son from knowing what he\u2019s up to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then it\u2019s spring 2021, and Callie\u2019s sister Leigh is called on at the last minute to defend an especially brutal serial rapist. Leigh works for a prestigious Atlanta, Georgia, law firm and has only days before jury selection begins. The demeanor of the defendant, Andrew Tenant, puts her off, but she can\u2019t say no without risking her job. Soon she realizes her creepy new client is the grown-up boy from long-ago, when she and Callie were his baby-sitters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something bad happened back in 1998, involving Callie and Leigh, and they\u2019ve kept the secret ever since. To Leigh\u2019s dismay, Andrew uses what he knows about it to manipulate her into mounting a vigorous and unethical defense. No matter that she\u2019s convinced he\u2019s guilty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leigh is afraid to sabotage the defense in any way, certain that Andrew would not hesitate to harm the people she loves, including Callie. Callie has long-standing substance abuse problems, and some of the most poignant parts of the story are her attempts to calibrate the drugs in her system so she can cope with the demands posed by Andrew\u2019s threats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are both good characters and bad in this novel, and the good ones are treated with respect and compassion, despite their flaws. Oh, and wait until you meet Callie and Leigh\u2019s mother! A library full of child-rearing advice wouldn\u2019t have changed her behavior an iota!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story is set in the midst of the pandemic, and though it\u2019s not about covid, the characters\u2019 everyday lives are affected by it\u2014to mask (or not), the erratic court schedule. The disease is part of the realistic environment of the story. Slaughter, who lives in Atlanta, set the novel there, though it\u2019s not a novel in which place plays a dominant role. Occasionally, the author breaks in and delivers a lecture on, for example, the way drug addiction affects the brain, which derails the story for a few paragraphs and feels unnecessary. Readers put off by cursing will have much to complain about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I personally found Leigh too repetitive and tiresome with her guilt and self-doubt and her willingness to jump to (consistently wrong) conclusions about what other people are feeling. It felt clich\u00e9 to make Andrew super-wealthy, and he was over-the-top slimy, but then a psychopath would be extreme, no? Those quibbles aside, the book held my interest and I found more to like than not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s a recent interview with Karin Slaughter<\/a> related to this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Order False Witness<\/em> here from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or here from IndieBound<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The standalone thriller begins in the summer of 1998, with the uneasy relationship between Callie and Buddy, which, for his part, seems to revolve solely around sex, rough sex, and keeping his ten-year-old son from knowing what he\u2019s up to. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"False Witness - standalone thriller from Karin Slaughter has a lot of heart. ","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,366,40,1567,126],"tags":[1906,412,89],"class_list":["post-9217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-drama","category-fiction","category-lawyer","category-reading-2","tag-crime","tag-mystery","tag-reading"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2oF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9217"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9219,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9217\/revisions\/9219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}