From a former New Orleans public defender comes a gritty and thrilling interrogation of crime, violence, and the limits of justice in the chaotic times after Hurricane Katrina…
A 16-year-old confesses to the murder of a local celebrity—a hero of New Orleans’s shaky post-storm recovery... The boy’s father, doing life in prison on the installment plan for a series of minor offenses, will do anything to save him...
Enter Ben Alder, a carpetbagging attorney (and former rabbinical seminary student) who has drifted down to New Orleans. He winds up defending them both.
Ben and his partner, Boris, are public defenders obsessed with redeeming their case history of failures, and willing to do anything to protect their clients. As Ben tries to disrupt a corrupt and racist criminal justice system that believes an inexplicable crime has been solved, he confronts his own legacy of loss and faith. And as the novel hurtles towards its tragic, redemptive conclusion, Ben finds himself an onlooker and a perpetrator where he thought he was the hero.
A riveting and propulsive story about loyalty and grief, Seraphim is also an unflinching cross-examination of a broken legal system; a heartbreaking portrait of a beautiful, lost city, filled with children who kill and are killed; and a discomforting reflection on privilege, prejudice, and power.
