History Events in Durham

In 1966, the FBI sexually blackmailed liberal Justice Abe Fortas. He would become a Bureau informant about pending Supreme Court cases. Set against the political tensions of 1960s Washington, Charns’s latest novel traces the cost of truth in a system engineered to suppress it. 1966, Washington. When George Smith, a jailed Black teenager, claims he holds a secret capable of destroying a Supreme Court justice, his court-appointed lawyer, Mitch Pilsudski, is drawn into a case that exposes the limits of the law itself. As Mitch searches for the truth, he discovers that justice is designed less to protect the vulnerable than to contain risk. With the FBI quietly tightening its grip on the High Court, backroom negotiations, suppressed evidence, and moral compromise begin to shape the fate of men positioned on opposite ends of power. The Prairies Book Review.