“The Sorrows of Gathering is twisty and compelling. Part courtroom thriller, part historical epic, it gathers you in from the beginning and rushes you along, with its complex characters, strong writing, and the surprises that continue to the very end. Highly recommended.”
– Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent and Presumed Guilty
In the picturesque college town of Marshford, Massachusetts, a young man named Mathew McKinnon is
missing and presumed dead. The year is 1983, three years into the Reagan Presidency and the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.
The architect Nolan Gathering, to whom the young man was apprenticed, is arrested and charged with murder. The District Attorney seeks the death penalty, which has been recently re-instated in the Commonwealth,
because the murder was allegedly committed during the sexual assault of the young man.
The accused enlists the aid of his childhood sweetheart, Rebecca Quinn Martin, a nationally renowned criminal defense attorney.
The Sorrows of Gathering evokes Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars. By weaving a complex and compelling story around a central character accused of murder, the novel addresses systemic prejudices that pervert public attitudes, infect our legal system, and devastate
personal lives.
The Sorrows of Gathering is more than a legal drama. Over multiple generations, the novel’s themes of love and valor, sexuality and sacrifice, betrayal and redemption, time and loss, growth and awakening make it a work of serious fiction. “Like any affecting story, The Sorrows of Gathering is both instructive and emotive, igniting empathy, a kind of moral integrity, and a potency strong enough to raise the spirit.”
