![Cover image for The Guilty One [electronic resource] :](https://images.yourcloudlibrary.com/delivery/img?type=DOCUMENTIMAGE&documentID=eb4x189&token=nobody "Cover image for The Guilty One [electronic resource] :")
Summary
Summary
Moving and suspenseful, Lisa Ballantyne's The Guilty One is a psychological thriller about the darkness in each of us. It explores how we are all tied to our pasts, and what it means to be guilty.
Solicitor Daniel Hunter is called to defend 11-year-old Sebastian who has been charged with the murder of a young boy on a London playground. While examining Sebastian's life in order to save it, Daniel can't help but be transported to his own difficult youth spent in foster care--a time when the one he trusted the most was the one who betrayed him...
Emotionally wrought, and with an abundance of twists and turns, The Guilty One is a character-driven novel of suspense that explores the true nature of guilt.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A child-on-child murder drives Ballantyne's searing debut, a psychological legal thriller. Because solicitor Daniel Hunter, an experienced defender of children accused of crimes, was a troubled child himself, he connects with his disturbed client, 11-year-old Sebastian Croll, who's on trial for beating to death eight-year-old Ben Stokes in a London park. Alternating flashbacks of Daniel's youth as a fatherless foster child of a drug-addicted mother given by social workers to eccentric, perceptive, and loving Minnie Flynn demystify Daniel's rejection of Minnie, who both hurt him and saved him from Sebastian's fate or worse. Meanwhile, the truth about Sebastian and his arguably overdrawn dysfunctional family gradually emerges. Drawn with ruthless realism, Ballantyne's sympathetic major characters, especially Daniel and Minnie, leap from her pages into readers' hearts. Ballantyne also indicts the British government's stingy refusal to fund genuine rehabilitation of juvenile offenders in this scalding exploration of childhood violence, adult refusal to forgive, and redemptive love. Agent: Nicola Barr, Greene & Heaton (U.K.). (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Similar in some ways to Simon Lelic's recent The Child Who, this moving, insightful debut focuses on the relationship between Sebastian, a child accused of murder, and his solicitor Daniel, who has shrugged off his own damaged childhood but is forced to confront his demons by the disturbing strangeness of Sebastian's case and the death of his estranged foster mother Minnie (a fantastic character). Its conclusion is nail-biting courtroom drama, but this is really a novel about behavioural and class boundaries. The wealthy, like Sebastian's parents, abuse their children but are left alone by social services. Working-class Daniel, by contrast, was removed from his drug-addict mother at 11 - the same age Sebastian is now - and transformed by Minnie's tough love. It's easy to see why this caused such a stir at Frankfurt last year. If it isn't this year's Before I Go To Sleep, I'll eat my laptop. - John O'Connell Similar in some ways to Simon Lelic's recent The Child Who, this moving, insightful debut focuses on the relationship between Sebastian, a child accused of murder, and his solicitor Daniel, who has shrugged off his own damaged childhood but is forced to confront his demons by the disturbing strangeness of Sebastian's... - John O'Connell.
Kirkus Review
The tales of two troubled boys at individual crossroads are interwoven in Ballantyne's first novel. Daniel Hunter grew up on the mean streets, with a drugged-out mother and an attitude that landed him in constant trouble. Removed from the mother's home, the English boy bounced from foster home to foster home until he finally ended up at Minnie's. The Irish Minnie, a widow whose only child has died, gave up nursing and moved to the country with her family, but she suffered twin tragedies that have left her alone with her animals and small farm, eking out a living selling eggs and produce and taking in foster kids. When Daniel arrives, Minnie tries to mold the disturbed and violent young boy into a man and eventually earns his respect, but years later, as a grown attorney, he and Minnie have parted ways and he no longer speaks to the woman who saved him. When he receives news that causes him to reflect on the years he put between himself and the affable, loving Minnie, he plunges into a case involving another vulnerable but possibly murderous boy named Sebastian. When Sebastian, whose wealthy parents hide a multitude of sins from the world, is charged with killing an 8-year-old playmate, Daniel must reach back into his own past to defend the child and prevent him from spending his formative years in prison, locked up like a monster. Ballantyne, who is Scottish, exhibits comfortable familiarity with the British legal and social systems, and the story she tells is both absorbing and compelling. This very lengthy novel takes the reader through Daniel's childhood and both the trial preparation and the trial itself. The prose is strong, but Daniel and Sebastian are so damaged that it can be difficult to feel empathy for them. A captivating debut, but Daniel and Sebastian prove difficult to like, and readers may find themselves unsatisfied when turning the last page.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
London criminal solicitor Daniel Hunter feels a certain affinity for client Sebastian Croll, an 11-year-old charged with murdering 8-year-old Ben Stokes, his neighbor and playmate, in a nearby playground. Just as Hunter gets Sebastian's case, he receives a last communication from Minnie Flynn, the adoptive mother from whom he became estranged years earlier, causing him to relive memories of his own difficult childhood, during which he was separated from his beloved, drug-addict mother. The chapters alternate between Hunter's youth and the strong forensic and circumstantial case against Sebastian, who's considered precocious yet unsettling even by his own defense team as he maintains his innocence and as his own troubled home life comes to light. This is a sensitive and insightful narrative that gradually builds suspense during Sebastian's trial and Hunter's revelations. Truth is revealed in the final pages, but Ballantyne leaves it to the reader to determine just where the guilt lies. An accomplished first novel and a good bet for book groups.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
There's an autumnal tone to Donna Leon's latest Venetian mystery, THE GOLDEN EGG (Atlantic Monthly, $26), that suits the melancholy mood of Commissario Guido Brunetti when he looks into the suspicious death of Davide Cavanella, the deaf and mentally disabled man who worked for his neighborhood dry cleaner. It strikes Brunetti as sad, as well as sinister, that he's unable to find any public record of Davide, that his mother can't produce her son's birth or baptismal certificates, school documents or any other verification of his life. In the eyes of the state, Davide never existed. "It daunted Brunetti, the pathos of it." An articulate man who delights in the lively conversations he shares with his wife and two children, Brunetti is haunted by the silent world Davide inhabited. "If the Brunettis had a religion," Leon tells us, "it was language." And so this thoughtful policeman is also led to brood over the debasement of language by the politicians and bureaucrats who cynically confuse, misdirect and misinform the public. A Neapolitan colleague reminds him that even regional dialects serve a divisive purpose, keeping people from recognizing their common cause and preventing them from realizing that "we're all the same: beaten down by this system that is never going to change." As Leon wryly points out in this unusually reflective detective story, the same system that couldn't keep track of Davide has somehow managed to overlook evidence that the mayor's son is complicit in a bribery scheme. "Why do we tolerate this," Brunetti's secretary asks when presented with this latest flagrant example of corruption, "and not go after them with clubs?" That's something Brunetti often wonders. And he sadly concludes that short of emigration or suicide, there aren't many options for people whose political system is so dysfunctional. Meanwhile, the commissario carries on as he always does, solving one crime at a time, reversing one injustice after another, then heading home to drink a little wine, read a little Tacitus and play another little language game with his family. Murdered children aren't uncommon in genre thrillers, but children who are killers are harder to find. That alone makes Lisa Ballantyne's jolting first novel, THE GUILTY ONE (Morrow/HarperCollins, papar, $14.99), something of a novelty, since it follows the trial of an 11-year-old boy accused of battering an 8-year-old playmate to death in a London park. But this young Scottish writer isn't simply out to shock; she's intent on raising awareness of how parental abuse and societal indifference instill in some children a smoldering, explosively violent rage. Daniel Hunter was one of those children. After being taken from his drug-addicted mother, he went through several foster families before ending up with Minnie Flynn, a bighearted farm woman who took in damaged children the way she rescued unwanted animals. Saving Daniel from his furies was a long and hazardous ordeal, but he finally emerged to become a lawyer specializing in the defense of juveniles like Sebastian Croll. At age 11, Sebastian is the youngest client Daniel has defended, but he's the same age Daniel was before Minnie tamed him, and he's seething with the same anger. The two stories have their parallel points, and both are sensitively told. But while Sebastian's trial provides high drama, Daniel's self-destruction is quietly heartbreaking. The protagonists in Jo Bannister's various procedural series range from clever amateur sleuths and scrappy private eyes to seasoned police inspectors, but one way or another, they're all variations on the civilized English detective who is patient with people and good at whodunits. DEADLY VIRTUES (Minotaur, $24.99) adds another detective to this roster: Hazel Best, a young cop still on probation and on her first posting - to a small West Midlands town known for its low crime rate. Hazel is a straight shooter, pragmatic but principled, and her main function is to deal with an ethical dilemma that will toughen her up for future assignments. But the most remarkable character here is Gabriel Ash, a recovering trauma victim and the baffled recipient of a coded message from a young man who knows he's about to be murdered. This is the kind of puzzle plot Bannister is known for; Gabriel is the kind of character who takes satisfying shape before your eyes; and Hazel's is the kind of classic detective work that's always welcome in a mad, mad world. The best scenes in C.J. Box's new wilderness adventure, BREAKING POINT (Putnam, $26.95), are those in which heavily armed men chase one another up a mountain in Wyoming and everybody starts shooting at everybody else. But the thrills don't stop there. Some idiot sends up a drone (a drone? in Wyoming?) with a missile that starts a forest fire, sending whoever is still alive scrambling to get off the mountain before they're toast. The thing is, the only escape route is across Savage Run Canyon, an impassable geological wonder "so steep and narrow that sunlight rarely shone on the stream in the bottom." O.K., it's hopeless; but let's just say that a few survivors (led by that nice game warden Joe Pickett) manage to make it. Do you think they might have to navigate that treacherous river on a log? Box really knows how to write this stuff; he actually seems to get better at it with every book. But he's never been very good at character development, and his current villains (mostly agents from the evil federal government) are pathetic. 'Were all the same,' a cynical colleague tells Commissario Brunetti, since we're all 'beaten down by this system.'
Library Journal Review
Ballantyne's debut novel is a psychological exploration of two damaged children. One is 11-year-old Sebastian, who has been charged with the murder of his eight-year-old friend Ben. The other is his lawyer, Daniel Hunter, who as a child survived a series of foster homes and thought he'd found a safe place when he was adopted by his last foster mother, Minnie. But something went horribly wrong and Daniel hasn't seen Minnie in years. When he learns that she has died, Daniel is thrown into a guilty tailspin. And as he pursues a defense for Sebastian, he can't help identifying with this strange, and sometimes scary, boy who reminds him of the angry, lost child he once was. VERDICT Though the novel opens with a murder, the legal case that follows is not really the point. The suspense comes in the exploration of just what went wrong in Daniel's past. Ballantyne hits some strong emotional beats, and fans of Vanessa Diffenbaugh's The Language of Flowers will find much to like here. [See Prepub Alert, 9/27/12.]-Jane Jorgenson, Madison P.L., WI (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
