Amazon’s Best Books of 2024

On a dark night in Dallas, the body of an affluent white man was left for dead in a poor Black neighborhood. A man was swiftly arrested for the heinous crime, a jury spent about an hour deliberating his fate, and he was locked away for 35 years. But Ben Spencer didn’t murder Jeffrey Young, as reams of evidence proved. He was just in the wrong place, at the wrong time—and the investigation and his trial were bungled at every turn. This was by design, as NPR reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty reveals in her gasp-inducing narrative about how the whims of chance, politics, racism, and our country’s laws make it shockingly easy to wrongly convict somebody, and nearly impossible to win their freedom. Written with the drama of a John Grisham novel, the character-building of The Wire or Charles Dickens, this David and Goliath story will provoke outrage, and action. Because, as this book proves beyond any reasonable doubt, what happened to Ben could happen to nearly anyone. 

Review by Lindsay Powers, Amazon Editor.
November 2024 | Amazon