Salvation

In this crucial, testimonial true-crime work—a real-life A Time to Kill from a living legend of crime fiction—a legal team’s investigation into a decades-old death penalty conviction opens a slate of fundamental questions about the nation we live in and the systems that govern it. In 1994 a Mexican migrant worker named Aurelio Santos is convicted of killing a two-year-old girl in a horrific, unthinkable manner. Tried by an all-white jury in a conservative jurisdiction in California’s Central Valley, Santos is sentenced to death and, for the next twenty-odd years, languishes in San Quentin’s death row awaiting lethal injection, though he maintains his factual innocence all the while. In 2015 his case is handed to the lawyers at the Capital Post-Conviction Center—the CPCC—whose modus operandi is to fight the fact of death penalty in the United States. They know their clients, in most cases, are not innocent, but they also believe that no society calling itself civilized and democratic should practice capital punishment in the first place. So they take Santos’s case, even though their chances of overturning his sentence—given the facts of the original case, and given just how guilty those facts make him out to be—are about as good as drawing blood from a stone. But their Sisyphean task, taken up over the course of these pages, is Aurelio Santos’s only shot at salvation. For fans of the social-issue crime fiction of Cheryl Head, Attica Locke, Don Winslow, and John Grisham, Salvation is a rare and page-turning glance inside the tumultuous, contradictory, and potentially life-saving warrens of the American legal system, a legal thriller that addresses questions of justice and fairness deeply pertinent to our times, and uses the system—and the people who work and toil within it—to answer them.