“A Calamity of Souls” is the best thing David Baldacci has written in ages—maybe ever. It’s got all the compulsive page-turnability of his best thrillers, but a lot more heart and soul than his customary actioner.

This is a character-driven legal drama, set in 1968 Virginia, which finds Black Vietnam veteran Jerome Washington on trial in (extremely segregated) Freeman County for the murders of two of its eminent white citizens (and his employers), Leslie and Anne Randolph.

Because of the public outcry, the death penalty has been reinstated, and Jerome seems destined for the electric chair unless white criminal defence lawyer Jack Lee and black attorney Desiree DuBose from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund can compel a jury to see past the overwhelming evidence against Jerome—and the colour of his skin.

A Byzantine web of lies surrounds the deaths of the Randolphs, and Baldacci’s rendering of the lawyer’s investigation is smooth as silk, replete with bursts of incident. The courtroom theatrics, too, are as intoxicating as anything by Grisham and Turow. No surprise, given Baldacci’s legal background. The contours of the plot will be familiar to most, but having read thrillers of this type for thirty years now, an echo of similitude has never bothered me. In “A Calamity of Souls,” Baldacci’s efficiency as a storyteller is on full display, but a renewed focus on character (in particular the interpersonal dynamics between Jack and Desiree) and setting feels truly revitalising for an author who, now fifty novels deep into his oeuvre, could quite easily phone it in.