(the writer, not the other guys)
Let’s say you’re the author of the greatest mystery story ever told. Do you give away the big secret before the end, knowing that a lot of people won’t bother with the rest? Or do you ignore the constant carping and let everyone get to the ending on their own?
Just asking.
Previous post: Starry, Starry Knight
COMING SOON: To effect just outcomes, the justice system requires law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges committed above all to doing justice. Those whose allegiance is to winning regardless of evidence do the opposite of justice: They corrupt the system. This is the jaw-dropping story of one such corruption and its surprise ending.
On Labor Day 2007, a forest fire broke out in California’s eastern Sierra Nevada and eventually burned about 65,000 acres. Investigators from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the United States Forest Service took a mere two days to conclude that the liable party was the successful forest-products company Sierra Pacific Industries, founded as just a tiny sawmill nearly sixty years earlier by one Red Emmerson.
The investigative report on the fire declared that SPI’s independent logging contractor had started the conflagration by driving a bulldozer over a rock, creating a spark that flew into a pile of brush. No fire had ever been proven to start that way, but based on the report the U.S. Department of Justice and California’s attorney general filed nearly identical suits against Emmerson’s company. The amount sought was nearly a billion dollars, enough to bankrupt or severely damage it. Emmerson, of course, fought back.
Week by week, month by month, year by year, his lawyers discovered that the investigators had falsified evidence, lied under oath, fabricated science, invented a narrative, and intentionally ignored a mountain of exculpatory evidence. Never did they pursue either a known arsonist who was in the area that day, or a young man who repeatedly volunteered alibis contradicted by facts.
Though the government lawyers had not known at the start that the investigation was tainted, they nonetheless refused to drop the suits as the discovery process continued and dozens of revelations made clear that any verdict against Emmerson’s company would be unjust.
Scorched Worth is a riveting tale that dramatizes how fragile and arbitrary justice can be when those empowered to act in the name of the people are more loyal to the bureaucracies that employ them than to the people they’re supposed to serve. It’s also the story of a man who refused to let the government take from him what he’d spent a lifetime earning with his own hands.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Ignore all carping.
Just finished reading LA ’56 and thoroughly enjoyed it. Every page had something interesting and it had great pacing. Very concise and entertaining.
Antonio: Thanks much.
Not to turn this into a congrats thread, but I also appreciated L.A. ’56, and noted so. I number my readers in pairs at best, but here’s hoping I made you a sale or two 😉
http://friarsfires.blogspot.com/2013/05/three-different-books.html
Brett, thanks for the very kind words. I hadn’t seen the review before and am pleased to read it now. By the way, you should know that the first several drafts of the book were written, as you suggested, in the conventional past-tense author’s voice. But clearly, something was missing. Only when I decided to go present tense did the urgency of the story come alive for me as the book’s first reader.
You’re welcome.
That’s interesting to hear; it may be just a preference of mine then. After all, you’re the pro, and your way it sold 😉