March 28, 2011
Gore's watered-down foray into The Help territory features a Southern-born law student whose attempts to solve a decades-old hate crime stir up predictable outrage. After a bike accident, Jiminy Davis takes a leave of absence from law school to head home to Fayeville, Miss., home of her beloved grandmother, Willa. Distraction presents itself in the form of Bo, the med schoolâbound nephew of Willa's housekeeper, Lyn, until Jiminy stumbles on a long-buried tragedy: her namesake, Lyn's daughter, was killed along with her father in a suspicious accident that was never investigated by the local police. Over her grandmother's objections, Jiminy digs into Fayeville history and, with the help of a scruffy out-of-town lawyer, confronts an ugly truth. Though it contains most of the elements of a legal thriller, Gore's latest (after Sammy's House) lacks the suspense needed to bind the story, while Jiminy's naïveté supplies a weak motivator for dragging out a fairly straightforward mystery.