I debated between 2 and 3 stars. I didn't exactly 'like' it but that was mostly because of the details of the case his dad was handling. The case was so horrific and upsetting that it made it difficult to feel anything else even though the book is about more than that specific case. It is also about love and the narrator's relationship with his family, but primarily with his dad at the end of his dad's life. That part of the story is beautifully related. ( )

When his 84-year-old father, still nominally in practice as a criminal lawyer, unexpectedly gets called in to act as a public defender in a murder case in Skagit County, WA, the narrator — a blocked novelist — has to drive him around and ends up getting interested in the case himself. But this isn't one of those murder cases you read about in novels, where the defence attorney solves the case himself and proves in the nick of time that someone else did it. Guterson sets up a grimly realistic perspective, where there is no mystery about the essentials of what has happened, and the task of the justice system is to find some kind of resolution to a desperately sad sequence of events whilst treating everyone concerned as fairly as possible.

The rather harrowing case — based on research Guterson did on a real case in Skagit County from 2011 — involves the death of a young Ethiopian girl, Abeba/Abigail, as a result of sustained abuse by her adoptive parents, people who have lost touch with the rest of society and somehow also lost all sense of proportion in their belief that it is their Christian duty to maintain authority over their children. Abeba is an orphan with an exceptionally tough early childhood in Ethiopia behind her: her tragedy is that she has the strength of mind to resist the Harveys' attempts to dominate her, but not the physical robustness to survive what they do to her.

But then this isn't quite a "true crime" novel, either: for very good reasons, the narrator drops his reportage on the case in mid-stream, and we divert off into another story centred on his family life and writing career, which mostly seems to involve him hanging around in his sister's tea-shop, Cajovna. Because tea-shops is what Seattle is famous for, right?

An interesting and quite worthwhile take on the "novel about not being able to write" idea, with some moderately interesting things to say about families and about what lawyers and writers actually do. ( )

David Guterson gives us 250 pages of stories stitched into a novel that reads like a memoir. It's about the unnamed narrator, who is a failed writer, his father, a court case involving horrible child abuse by rabidly strict parents of several children, leading to the death of their adopted Ethiopian-born, daughter. The abuse story is woven together with possibly related incidents from the narrators life.

I want to believe this is a complex, multilayered telling about current day American life, but still see it as the core story of the trial, padded to fit into the length of a novel.

That's not to say that there isn't strong and beautiful writing from time to time, only that fine speech and description is mixed in with confusing detailed exposition and curiously unrelated storylines.

The book drew me in, kept me alternately interested and wondering, but left me at the end uncertain what to think of it. ( )

A fiction writer decides to give up writing at about the same time his aged father, a defense attorney, takes a final case but is unable to drive. Thus, the narrator of the story, the son, tells of a trial of a husband and wife charged with murder by abuse. A young girl has been adopted from Ethiopia by Christian fundamentalists; she is abused by especially the mother believing to discipline her.

The story is tragic as the novel also presents the girl's life in Ethiopia. The descriptions of the abuse are chilling. However, the respect and love between the father and the son is warm, tender and respectful. The father actually passes away before the trial is finished and there are pages that seem to "get off the subject" as the narrator begins to go about his own life, but then the story swings back to the trial which has a new defense attorney.

One of the best sections of the book is the judge's pronouncement to the defendants who so firmly believe they are right and no court of law will be able to convince them otherwise.

An interesting book, well-written - it even held me during long rambling paragraphs. Good read. ( )

It's unclear what Guterson was trying to accomplish in this very mixed bag of a novel. At its core is the trial of a rigid and extreme fundamentalist Christian couple with many biological children who are homeschooled and harshly disciplined. Delvin and Betsy Harvey have been charged with "homicide by abuse" of their fairly recently adopted Ethiopian daughter. An elderly lawyer, the father of the novel's unnamed narrator, has agreed to defend Betsy. The mostly riveting middle section of The Final Case that focuses on witness testimony is the book's only real strength. The rest--fragmented musings on the writing life in a polarized America and esoteric subjects, such as the culture of tea and tea drinking--don't really add much. Guterson's prose is occasionally long winded and ponderous. Sentences that at times run on for more than dozen lines fail to reward even a very patient reader. In the end, I felt I'd been given a lot of puzzle pieces, not all of which belonged in the the same box. ( )