![]() ![]() He spends part of the trial deriding the intelligence of the jury and the witnesses and also believes that he’ll be found guilty simply because he’s an intellectual and privileged. As a narrator, he’s initially hard to peg and impossible to like. Sam isn’t a very nice man, and his arrogance does him no favours. Sandrine loved her job, her students and her community, but for Sam, none of it was ever good enough. Of course, if all your colleagues are “ mediocre” twerps, what does that make you? One of the herd or vastly superior? Testimony from witnesses and Sam’s unfolding memories show how two people can view the same town, their friends and their neighbours through two entirely different lens. ![]() I always thought them a mediocre gaggle of academics waylaid in an inconsequential terminus at the end of the academic line. I’d endlessly scoffed at my fellow professors. Both Samuel and Sandrine taught at a small college in Georgia, and while Sandrine loved her job and, according to Sam showed “ unaccountable devotion” to her students, to Sam, the students are all dull and “ uninspiring,” not worth the slightest effort on his part. Sam’s arrogance extends to his colleagues: Sandrine was a complex woman deeply satisfied with her professional life while her husband Samuel is embittered by the fact that he never wrote the ‘great novel’ he intended to write, and neither did he have the stellar career he thought he deserved. Through the course of the trial, Samuel begins to realize that he didn’t know his wife nearly as well as he thought he did. Did he or didn’t he murder his wife? With each subsequent witness, Samuel’s memories float to the surface effectively bringing Sandrine back to life, so that a portrait of the dead woman emerges. This juxtaposition allows us to see the barebones of the case and then moves us into the mind of the man accused of murder as he recalls the circumstances surrounding the testimonies given by various witnesses.Īs the story unfolds, hints about Samuel’s guilt or innocence begin to appear. The court case, of course, provides a strict structure for the narrative, but in comparison, Samuel’s thoughts are in freefall. While the court case determines whether or not Professor Samuel Madison murdered his wife, as the narrator, Samuel’s flashback memories provide us with a painful glimpse into their marriage. The book opens on the first day of the murder trial of English and American Literature Professor Samuel Madison who is accused of murdering his wife, a “ much -loved” professor of history, Sandrine Madison, and then staging her death to look like a suicide. Of course, there are crimes that break the law and for which people are caught and imprisoned, but there are other ‘crimes’ too–moral crimes, or moral transgressions if you will, frequently committed against those we supposedly love, and this are the two territories Cook explores in a parallel fashion during the murder trial. Sandrine’s Casehits some buttons for me–this is a very cerebral crime novel, an unusual combination, so there’s no violence and a crime may or may not have been committed. We’ve all seen films that fall into that ‘courtroom drama’ category, and the novel Sandrine’s Casetakes place mainly in the courtroom–either through the scandalous murder trial that takes place, or in the mind of the man accused of murdering his wife as various witnesses give their testimony. For obsessive readers, it’s always exciting to ‘discover’ a writer who already has an impressive backlist, but before I could get to that backlist, here’s Thomas Cook back again a year later with another unusual crime novel. Cook came late in his career with The Crime of Julian Wells. My introduction to the crime novels of Thomas H.
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