~ finding the right voice ~
Final Argument is the startling story of a prosecuting attorney who, twelve years after condemning a convicted murderer to Death Row, returns to the same courtroom to try to save that same man's life. Best-selling author Clifford Irving has crafted a masterly tale of murder, guilt, and infidelity, set in Florida and featuring that rarest of heroes - a lawyer with a conscience and an all-abiding belief in justice. When state attorney Ted Jaffe gives up his prosecutorial job in Jacksonville in favor of a partnership with a prestigious Sarasota law firm, he does it for the security of his family. But in leaving Jacksonville, he also turns his back on the memories of his love affair with Connie Zide, a hauntingly beautiful older woman, and the subsequent trial of a young black man whom Ted Jaffe prosecuted for the murder of Solomon Zide, Connie's billionaire husband. A decade later, living the good life in Sarasota, Jaffe hears from a client an admission of perjury that draws him inexorably back into the Zide murder case, and toward the nightmarish belief that Darryl Morgan, the man he banished to Death Row - and now only days away from execution - may be innocent. Can a lawyer represent a murderer he once prosecuted? The legal establishment insists that he can't. But Ted Jaffe refuses to accept that verdict. Final Argument is the story of his war - at the risk of his career, his marriage, his personal safety, and the survival of his troubled teenage son - to save the lifeblood of a man he believes he has grievously wronged. What he uncovers about the events surrounding the murder of Solomon Zide, and the truths he learns about his own sexual conduct and emotional denial, combine to makeClifford Irving's Final Argument a superior suspense story, an incisive tale of the consequences of lust, and a penetrating portrait of a modern man caught in a web of conflicting emotions. Its climactic cross-examination - in that same Jacksonville courtroom where the first murder trial took place - is one of the most thrilling in the entire genre of courtroom drama.