“Dorwart’s classic prose yields a devastating portrait of justice as a precarious ideal that can be corrupted by fear, political opportunism, and the seductive comfort of blame.”
BookLife Reviews
BookLife Reviews
Dorwart’s tense debut novel follows a successful San Francisco defense attorney back to the Massachusetts town she left years ago. In 1957, Rebecca Martin and her childhood friend, Nolan Gathering, witness a disturbing death by hanging that leaves them shaken. In 1983, Rebecca returns to defend Nolan after his landscaper, Matthew McKinnon, disappears under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind scant physical evidence and an increasingly complicated account of his relationship with Nolan. The ordeal coincides with Massachusetts reinstating the death penalty and the emergence of the AIDS crisis, forcing Rebecca to defend her old friend while toeing the line between prejudice and proof. This balancing act brings Rebecca face to face with her repressed guilt—and the truth about a man she never truly managed to leave behind.
Dorwart crafts charged courtroom proceedings through Rebecca’s thorough cross examinations, which steadily loosen the prosecution’s seemingly solid case while showcasing Rebecca’s loyalty and competence. Nolan’s whisper of the Latin maxim “where there is doubt, there is freedom” becomes the story’s philosophical heartbeat, fundamentally rejecting comfortable certainty in favor of nuanced inquiry. Dorwart acutely illustrates how Nolan’s sexuality colors every piece of evidence, as seemingly innocent facts acquire sinister implications in a prejudiced community. The backstory of Nolan and Matthew’s professional relationship occasionally stretches the narrative and deflates the trial’s suspense, but Dorwart’s classic prose yields a devastating portrait of justice as a precarious ideal that can be corrupted by fear, political opportunism, and the seductive comfort of blame.
Part murder mystery and part courtroom drama, The Sorrows of Gathering presents an insightful autopsy of the human hunger for answers and understanding. Its most pressing insight—that the absence of evidence is swiftly weaponized as proof when people are eager to believe a particular story—forms the moral backbone of the narrative’s central question: what happens to justice when our collective itch to condemn overwhelms our courage to doubt?
Takeaway: Childhood best friends reunite in a harrowing murder trial.
Great for fans of: Domenic Stansberry’s The Confession, Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s A Great Country.
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