mikerickson reviewed The Holdout by Graham Moore
Review of 'The Holdout' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
As of the time of my writing this, I've only given a 5-star review to 10% of the 103 books I've rated on here, so I like to think that I'm stingy with handing those out. But honestly, I knew I was going to end up here with this book after just the first chapter.
I don't really read many thrillers, let alone the courtroom procedural variety, and I also don't even remember how this book ended up on my TBR or why I bought a physical copy several months ago. But the simple fact is that I had an unexpectedly good time with this book and literally did not want to stop reading when my lunch breaks were wrapping up.
Chapters alternate back and forth between an extremely high-profile court case that happened in 2009 (think like O.J. Simpson or Casey Anthony-levels of media attention), and forward to 2019, …
As of the time of my writing this, I've only given a 5-star review to 10% of the 103 books I've rated on here, so I like to think that I'm stingy with handing those out. But honestly, I knew I was going to end up here with this book after just the first chapter.
I don't really read many thrillers, let alone the courtroom procedural variety, and I also don't even remember how this book ended up on my TBR or why I bought a physical copy several months ago. But the simple fact is that I had an unexpectedly good time with this book and literally did not want to stop reading when my lunch breaks were wrapping up.
Chapters alternate back and forth between an extremely high-profile court case that happened in 2009 (think like O.J. Simpson or Casey Anthony-levels of media attention), and forward to 2019, when the surviving jurors are summoned back together by a podcast doing a special on the ten-year anniversary of the verdict. The case involved the disappearance of a billionaire's daughter, and the jury voted to acquit her teacher who was suspected of the murder, a decision that 84% of the entire country disagreed with. Needless to say, none of the jurors ever really were able to re-integrate back into society after that, so the reunion was a way to commiserate with the only other people who knew what they were going through.
Except one of the jurors is murdered the night before his interview. The one juror who claimed to have new evidence on the case.
It sounds way more cliché than I'm describing, but the execution is anything but. I can think of three specific scenes that honestly surprised me, and this plot really kept me on my toes. And I was also impressed how a roster of 12 jurors could have such distinct personalities that I never really got confused. And that's not even including all the present-day people and other characters that get involved; there's a really big cast here, but it never felt unmanageable. The fact that each of the "flashback" chapters focused on a different juror while the "present day" chapters followed just a singular protagonist probably went a long way towards achieving that, and I think that was a smart decision to structure the book that way.
I genuinely have no complaints about this book. I can't think of anything I didn't like or would've done differently.