When Jack Lee looks into and accepts the case of Jerome Washington, a Black man charged with murdering a prominent couple in their home in rural-ish Freeman, Virginia,  it attracts attention.  The year is 1968.  Local white men beat Jack up in his own office and a black female Civil Rights attorney shows up from Washington DC wanting a broader fight for Civil Rights.

 A Calamity of Souls 
by David Baldacci
2024 / 
Read by a cast 14h 28m 
Rating: C-  / legal who-done-it

David Baldacci is known for tales of suspense and legal thrillers. Long ago I read the Camel Club series but. I’ve passed on recent books because they seemed a bit gory. This one caught my eye because it was a stand-alone and the reader reviews seemed unusually good. My adult son is a regular reader of Baldacci novels.  

Sad to say, this is probably a much better book if it’s read than listened to because there are too many distractions in accent, emotionalism, voice quality and so on.  It became choppy with one reader (performer) reading the characters actual lines and another reading the “she said,” bit.

The plot is terrific, the characters nicely defined, the themes well developed.  I wasn’t quite able to tell about the writing because the “dramatization” overshadowed it.  (I’m old-fashioned, I don’t even want music in my audio books – I want the background and sound effects to sound like when I read the paper version – silent – lol!)

This might be a good young adult book – maybe ages 16-23 or so,