And The Sea Will Tell

I have just completed reading And the Sea Will Tell [amazon.com] by Vincent Bugliosi, after receiving a recommendation from a friend. It's a true story about two couples who separately sailed to a remote, uninhabited Pacific island, and how one couple ended up with both of the boats, presumably by murdering the other couple. Vincent Bugliosi (the author) was the trial lawyer who took on the job of defending the female defendant in the subsequent murder trial.

The narrative of the events that occurred on the island were fascinating, in a murder mystery kind of way -- although it is unpleasant that this story happens to be true. I was not expecting the book to be written from the point of view of a trial lawyer. Only the first half of the book is a narrative of the events occurring on the island (up to the date in question). The second half of the book is an account of what happened at the subsequent trial.

After reading the first half, it is difficult not to believe that the surviving couples aren't somehow guilty of murder. No doubt that certain pieces of information are deliberately withheld to lead you to that conclusion. And then what is amazing is that by the end of the book, you can't help but think that there's at least a pretty decent chance that the female defendant is innocent. It seems to have been written to take you through all of the emotions and internal debate that a jury member must have gone through at the trial.

So, in effect, it's a murder mystery crossed with a courtroom drama story. Only the courtroom drama is not depicted as it usually is on TV. The trial account details the hours of struggle that goes on behind the scenes of a trial, interpersonal problems between a lawyer and his client, and the difficulty of establishing anything as fact when no one (other than the defendants) were within a hundred miles of where the crime took place.

One particularly interesting section concerned judges, and how they are typically depicted as being learned, impartial men -- but the author believes that is usually not the case. His assertion (which you might expect was argued well, given that it had been written by a lawyer) was that politics and judges are inexorably intertwined, and that appointed judges are almost always appointed due to their political activity.

In the end, I felt that the book was not just a dry courtroom account of a trial. The book was interesting precisely because the reader's expectations were built slowly by surely throughout the book, climaxing with a surprisingly convincing summation given at the trial by Bugliosi. And there are enough twists at the end of the book to make the payoff worth the lengthy read. It's a very interesting book.