Rose Kauffman copes with her feelings for Nick Franco, the bishop's foster son, who left the Amish community under suspicious circumstances, while Rose's sister, Hen, tries to mend her marriage to her estranged "English" husband.
Vowing to spend more time with his wife and kids, Dismas Hardy is hesitant to take on the case of Graham Russo, a could-have-been -- great baseball player indicted for the murder of his father, Sal. Everyone knows that Sal was dying and had to be given morphine injections for his suffering, but Graham insists he wasn't the one who administered the fatal overdose. Was it suicide, mercy, or murder? Riveting legal suspense, combined with masterful storytelling makes The Mercy Rule a big, bold masterpiece of suspense.
In the aftermath of 9/11, few questioned the political narrative provided by the White House about Guantánamo and the steady stream of prisoners delivered there from half a world away. The Bush administration gave various rationales for the detention of the prisoners captured in the War on Terror: they represented extraordinary threats to the American people, possessed valuable enemy intelligence, and were awaiting prosecution for terrorism or war crimes. Both explicitly and implicitly, journalists, pundits, lawyers, academics, and even released prisoners who authored books about the island prison endorsed elements of the official narrative. In Selling Guantánamo, John Hickman exposes the holes in this manufactured story. He shines a spotlight on the critical actors, including Rumsfeld, Cheney, and President Bush himself, and examines how the facts belie the “official” accounts. He chastises the apologists and the critics of the administration, arguing that both failed to see the forest for the trees.