What do Jews do on Christmas Eve? Finish good books they are reading.

I've always been more a fan of Joan Didion than her husband; don't think I've finished anything of Dunne's before and the beginning of this one was (excuse the pun to be) a trial. But by the end it bore a not-so-distant modern cousin resemblance to the book that formed its epitaph--All the King's Men.


It seems to be about a trial of two young white men for a hate crime against a black man who might've been homosexual. It turns out to be about the characters who populate this small midwestern state--mostly the people involved in the case as attorneys and investigators, but also the criminals.

It has a lot to say about now what has become all-too-well understood media circuses but more about the broody despair of our injustice system, and maybe just the loneliness of lives that don't turn out as we would like.

Damn good stuff. Surprising that it hasn't been made into a movie, though it may be just slightly too complex.