Beneath a Ruthless Sun by 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner author Gilbert King is a crime thriller that grabbed me from the get-go.
You've got a racist sheriff and deputies; a mentally impaired teenager who is sent to a state hospital for the insane; and a female investigative journalist who just wouldn't quit trying to uncover the true story.
In 1957 Lake County Florida, in a small town of citrus groves, Blanche Knowles, the wife of a powerful citrus grower is raped by a negro, she said. Deputies raced to the shacks where all the black men lived who worked on an orange grove, and brought them in for questioning. Why a white nineteen year old spends 14 years in the notorious Chatthoochee for this crime is an incredible atrocity in this story.
With an IQ between 25-55, Jesse Daniels was diagnosed as an "imbecile" by the Florida Farm Colony for Epileptic and Feeble-Minded Persons in Gainesville in 1956. King depicts how sheriff Willis McCall goes after him and coerces him to confess to a rape he didn't commit.
Beneath a Ruthless Sun reveals the ugly, shameful racist and legal injustice history of central Florida. This true story made me question whether these injustices are really that far back in past? This is the stuff of movies.
I received Beneath a Ruthless Sun in a GoodReads giveaway.
Kara
