Decision

In his most powerful moving novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning ADVISE AND CONSENT, Allen Drury turns to one of America's most pressing problems---the deterioration of the criminal justice system---and to the body that is more important to its salvation than any other, the Supreme Court of the United States.

This is the story of many powerful individuals, both in Drury's principal fictional setting, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere in a deeply troubled America: of Earle Holgren, murderer, terrorist, lost soul...of the eight men and one woman who make up the author's fictitious but very human "Elphinstone court"...of Regard Stinnet, attorney general of South Carolina, who sees in his fellow citizens' concern for justice the opportunity for demagoguery that might take him to the White House...of Debbie Donnelson, lawyer, trapped by idealism and physical attraction into the defense of a man she knows to be a psychopathic killer...of Cathy Corning, Washington journalist, drawn by love to the side of the idealistic young Justice whose marriage is crumbling under the twin pressures of bitterness and tragedy...of Stanley "Moss" Pomeroy, struggling with his conscience and his principles as he attempts to judge the case of the man who killed his daughter...and above all of the court's newest Justice, Taylor Barbour, as he, too, struggles to reconcile a father's desire for vengeance with the principles and beliefs of a life-time dedicated to liberal causes and the law.

This is the story of a case that begins at Pomeroy Station Atomic Energy Installation in the South Carolina Blue Ridge and moves on with inexorable drive through the courts of South Carolin, "trial on the evening news," and the Supreme Court, until it reaches its shocking, ironic conclusion in the fear-haunted back streets of Washington's humid summer night. Along the way no one, from Earle Holgren to Tay Barbour, escapes being drawn into the vortex of one of America's major challenges: How to fairly reconcile the rights of the individual, be he or she victim or criminal, with the need to maintain a safe and secure democratic society.