IN PRINT …
FICTION Day of Doom David Baldacci ’86 Scholastic
This sixth and final book in the popular children’s series, The 39 Clues: Cahills vs. Vespers, begins with the kidnapping of seven members of the Cahill family. A shady organization known as the Vespers demands a list of ransoms from around the world, and thirteen-year-old Dan Cahill and his sister, Amy, set out on a global treasure hunt to meet the demands and keep their family safe. As they deliver the last ransom, hoping that their family will be released, the two realize that all their labor has only led them to a final, deadly turn. They have become pawns in a plot to harm millions of innocent people, as the Vespers stop at nothing in their attempt to take over the world. Dan, Amy, and their friends scramble to stop Vesper One in the nick of time. David Baldacci and his wife, Michelle, founded the Wish You Well Foundation, which works to promote literacy.
Leaving Tuscaloosa Walter Bennett ’72, LL.M. ’86 Fuze Publishing
Set against a tense, sweltering Alabama backdrop in 1962, the year before Bull Connor turned Birmingham’s fire hoses on civil rights protesters and the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, this story follows the paths of Richeboux Branscomb, a white teenager, and Acee
Waites, a black cook in a popular burger joint in Tuscaloosa. One night, after leaving the grill, Richeboux and his friends ride through a black neighborhood. As they approach a leader of the black community on a dark road, one of the boys takes aim and hits the man with a raw egg. Instead of just taking it, the man runs after them, his face twisted in both anger and fear. In that moment, a thoughtless prank spirals into a compelling tale of black and white. Through the events that follow, Richeboux and Acee to get to know each other as people, despite the fact that they came from different worlds. Bennett’s sharply etched fiction was inspired by his experiences growing up in the South. The novel, his first, was a 2010 finalist for the Bellwether Prize (now the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction). “Walter Bennett has a real gift for capturing time and place, and an absolute genius for creating his larger-than-life yet totally believable characters,” writes noted Southern writer Lee Smith. “Leaving Tuscaloosa is deeply moving, disturbing, haunting, and important.” Walter Bennett is a former lawyer, judge, and law professor living in Chapel Hill, N.C. He is a native of Tuscaloosa.
The Locusts of Padgett County Bert Goolsby LL.M. ’92 Alondra Press
Tobias Erscan, a black tenant farmer in the Deep South in the early 1900s, touches the shoulder of Lily Cato, a white music teacher and choir director, and unwittingly sets off a firestorm of reaction. He is accused of “assault with intent to ravish.” Citizens of the town demand “justice” and seek the death penalty, their racial prejudice stoked by the local newspaper and the Ku Klux Klan. Andrew Beauchamp, the criminal prosecutor for the case, sets about to prosecute Erscan for a capital crime. Though he feels some ambivalence about whether Erscan deserves the death penalty, he is more concerned with his reputation in the town and his chances in the coming elections, and so he refuses to plea bargain the charge to a lesser crime. He thought this would be the easier way out—at least for him—but he didn’t anticipate that his self-serving choice would lead to awful consequences for both Erscan and himself. The powerful story told in The Locusts of Padgett County was drawn from a legendary court case from 1909. Bert Goolsby is a former Chief Deputy Attorney General of South Carolina and criminal prosecutor.
UVA LAWYER / SPRING 2013 69