The Fire This Time
Every criminal defense attorney wants justice for his or her client especially if that client did not commit the heinous crime for which he will stand trial. Maddie Devlin, a public defender, is no different. To obtain justice for her client, she must overcome the ‘Perry Mason Curse.’ Poking holes in the prosecution’s case will not result in an acquittal. Only producing the killer will. To do this, she must put her life on the line without knowing if her gambit will succeed. Even if she survives, she may not be able to produce the killer. This is the dilemma Devlin confronts in defending her client.
Boston, MA, April, 1981. Tensions between its many religious, racial, and ethnic communities are at a fever pitch because of court-ordered busing to desegregate the city’s public schools. A few days before Passover, the body of the young son of Boston’s mayor is found. At the murder site is the skull cap or yarmulke of a rabbinic student with his name embroidered in it. The rabbinic student is arrested for the murder. Virulent and violent anti-Semitism explodes.
Devlin, whose reputation as a trial attorney is legendary, takes on the defense of the rabbinic student. Having toiled as a legal aid attorney for many years, she lusts for a break-out case that will vault her into the echelon of national go-to criminal defense attorneys.
This case, unfortunately, comes with personal conflicts and complications. First, the murder victim is a child. Since the death of her daughter years earlier, she has refused to defend anyone accused of killing a child. Second, the murder victim is the son of her cousin. The two branches of the Devlin family have been estranged since their grandfathers’ generation when Maddie’s grandfather was falsely accused of betraying her cousin’s grandfather to the British prior to the Dublin “Rising” of April, 1916.
With the guidance of an elderly rabbi who is a Holocaust survivor and an elderly Jewish attorney victimized by the anti-Semitism common in Boston’s corporate law firms, Devlin comes to appreciate the dire consequences this case poses to Boston’s Jewish community and Jewish communities throughout the United States whether the rabbinic student is convicted or acquitted because she out-lawyered the prosecution. To prove him innocent and quiet the anti-Semitism, she must find the killer together with evidence proving his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
The prosecution’s case appears air tight, but the odd behavior of Boston’s police chief triggers Devlin’s instincts that the case has weaknesses the police are covering up. To prove the rabbinic student innocent, she risks her life by venturing into the territory of Boston’s most notorious African-American street gang to gather evidence that the gang’s leader committed the blood libel.
Whether Devlin succeeds or fails, whether her innocent client is convicted or acquitted, propels the novel to its unanticipated and unforeseen climax.
As a greater Boston lawyer and resident, I bear witness to the animosities and tensions between Boston’s religious, ethnic, and racial communities and the porous veneer that suppresses them. I have always wanted to depict this in a novel. The Fire This Time is that novel.
The Fire This Time confronts hatred and revenge and the way that a person’s heritage controls current behavior whether the person realizes it or not. As James Baldwin would say of the characters in The Fire This Time, they are "people [who] are trapped in history and history is trapped in them." James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son: (1955)