Dear Readers,
As bestselling author
@malcolmgladwell notes, “Strangers are not easy.” So imagine eight strangers who can’t agree on anything compelled to serve together on a jury in an explosive trial filled with secrets. Can they possibly find common ground? In my latest novel, A TRUE VERDICT, they must reach an agreement—a vast number of lives are at stake.
MediMiracle Corporation manufactures Sophrosyne, a cure for opiate addiction. A data-analyst for the company, Ellison Ricard, claims that data shows Black users of Sophrosyne experience fatal side effects far more often than do people of other races. After Ricard confronts MediMiracle’s charismatic founder and CEO, Peyton Burke, security intervenes, and a violent confrontation ensues. The wheelchair bound Ricard—a Black man severely injured years earlier while participating in a civil rights protest—is fired that very day. He sues Burke and MediMiracle for civil rights violations, alleging that he was fired because he blew the whistle on the coverup and because he was Black. Is he a brilliant, sincere, credible person who is rightfully standing up against a deadly product? Or is he a delusional, embittered, and avaricious liar who is taking advantage of his former employer? Ricard’s fate rests with an eight-person jury so dysfunctional that they can’t even agree on electing a foreperson. Working together to reach a consensus on Ricard’s case means navigating a tempest of the most divisive issues in our world today: politics, sexism, drug abuse, capitalism, healthcare, and racism. Can eight people with different backgrounds, ages, classes, and political views avoid coming to blows, much less render a true verdict?
@Kirkus_Reviews describes A TRUE VERDICT as “A bravura demonstration of the truth that, as one of the jurors observes, ‘Our secrets define us as human beings.’” I hope you’ll do me the honor of picking up a copy of the novel and joining me in exploring the nature of truth in a thought-provoking, entertaining way.
—
@robertrotstein 
