Seraphim
A 16-year-old confesses to the murder of a local celebrity—a hero of New Orleans’s shaky post-storm recovery… The boy’s father, doing life in prison on the installment plan for a series of minor offenses, will do anything to save him…
Enter Ben Alder, a carpetbagging attorney (and former rabbinical seminary student) who has drifted down to New Orleans. He winds up defending them both.
Ben and his partner, Boris, are public defenders obsessed with redeeming their case history of failures, and willing to do anything to protect their clients. As Ben tries to disrupt a corrupt and racist criminal justice system that believes an inexplicable crime has been solved, he confronts his own legacy of loss and faith. And as the novel hurtles towards its tragic, redemptive conclusion, Ben finds himself an onlooker and a perpetrator where he thought he was the hero.
A riveting and propulsive story about loyalty and grief, Seraphim is also an unflinching cross-examination of a broken legal system; a heartbreaking portrait of a beautiful, lost city, filled with children who kill and are killed; and a discomforting reflection on privilege, prejudice, and power.
What People Are Saying
“Seraphim is a thrilling page-turner, as well as a deeply humane investigation into the many forms of justice. It will make you look at the world differently—as much as a book could hope to do.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Author of Everything Is Illuminated
“This beautifully written mystery-meditation on a failed justice system is tragic and inspiring.”
— Booklist Starred Review
“Joshua Perry’s New Orleans-based novel Seraphim is about many things; social justice and injustice, race and racism, friendship and betrayal, crime and punishment and the realpolitik of judicial compromise. It is a ‘lived’ novel; the characters and voices, the intimate details observed, small defeats and even smaller victories feel so true to life that the reader can forget that the story… is fiction.”
— Richard Price, Author of Clockers
“Remarkable and revealing.”
— The New Orleans Times Picayune