Book Review: Why? A Courtroom Drama of Self-Discovery
Why? A Courtroom Drama of Self-Discovery. R.H. King, Jr. Winnetka, IL: Walden Road Publishing, May 27, 2014, Trade Paperback and E-book, 318 pages.
Reviewed by Mary-Megan Kalvig.
At a time when horrific crimes happen every day, you can’t help but wonder why these things happen. R.H. King, Jr. uses his background as a lawyer to take you into the fictional courtroom to figure out why one person, who has no history of violence, would suddenly pull a gun on his classroom and kill multiple students.
Dan Jackson, a visiting professor at Dartmouth College, opens his briefcase in order to deliver midterm exams when he discovers two handguns. In an almost out-of-body experience, he takes out the guns and fires, killing fifteen students and injuring five others. While he knows what has just happened, he doesn’t know why it happened.
He has no memory of purchasing those guns or putting them in his briefcase. He realizes what he’s done and is prepared to face the consequences of his actions, except for the fact that he doesn’t know why he did it. Dan hopes that by pleading “not guilty by reason of insanity,” he’ll be able to figure out why he killed those people and find the peace he needs to accept his punishment.
While it might be hard to sympathize with someone who killed fifteen people, King does a great job making Dan sympathetic. This whole novel seems removed from the crime and the horrors it created. The tragedy is not glorified, and while that sounds insensitive in light of so many school shootings, this novel isn’t really about the crime. To be honest, any crime could have been committed in this book, as long as it got Dan Jackson in the courtroom with his life on the line. This crime, though, works to tug at the emotions of the reader because instinctually we know he’s a horrible person and want him punished. However, he is clearly a lost soul desperate for answers, and it makes the reader torn in terms of what should happen to him.
King’s experience as a lawyer helps to bring the courtroom to life without losing the reader along the way. Everything gets fully explained so that Dan and the reader know what is happening. At first, it seems as if Dan isn’t all that smart since he repeatedly says, “I don’t understand.” As a professor, you would expect him to be a little bit more worldly and smarter, but he has just committed a horrible crime and probably isn’t altogether there. This ignorance also works for the reader, who might want to fully understand psychiatric or legal language. This strategy keeps the story going and doesn’t alienate readers.
With this novel, the author does a great job of drawing the reader in and getting the reader invested in the characters. There’s enough drama in the courtroom that it doesn’t grow stale or monotonous listening to testimony. I was grateful for the twist near the end of the book since I didn’t like the way it would have ended otherwise. However, with the twist, everything finds a way to be neatly tied up in a bow. Not giving anything away about the ending, the twist starts working out great for the story, but then it just works too hard to make everything right and is too picture-perfect for my taste. The novel is not destroyed by the ending, though. In some ways the ending really works to drive home the novel’s theme about forgiveness.
Dan Jackson’s quest for the reason why he suddenly killed his students is a story that delves into someone’s motivation and the things from our past that still haunt us. It is a great novel that draws you in with Dan’s mystery and the tug-of-war with your emotions as you try to figure out what the best outcome would be for this character whom you can’t help but hate on an intellectual level but feel sorry for on an emotional level. This is a book worth picking up.