Real Men Read: ‘The Holdout’ by Graham Moore

Thursday, May 23, 2024
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

About the Book

It’s the most sensational case of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Jessica Silver, heiress to a billion-dollar real estate fortune, vanishes on her way home from school, and her teacher, Bobby Nock, a twenty-five-year-old African American man, is the prime suspect. The subsequent trial taps straight into America’s most pressing preoccupations: race, class, sex, law enforcement, and the lurid sins of the rich and famous. It’s an open-and-shut case for the prosecution, and a quick conviction seems all but guaranteed—until Maya Seale, a young woman on the jury, convinced of Nock’s innocence, persuades the rest of the jurors to return the verdict of not guilty, a controversial decision that will change all their lives forever.

Flash forward ten years. A true-crime docuseries reassembles the jury, with particular focus on Maya, now a defense attorney herself. When one of the jurors is found dead in Maya’s hotel room, all evidence points to her as the killer. Now, she must prove her own innocence—by getting to the bottom of a case that is far from closed.

As the present-day murder investigation entwines with the story of what really happened during their deliberation, told by each of the jurors in turn, the secrets they have all been keeping threaten to come out—with drastic consequences for all involved.

About the Author

Graham Moore is a New York Times bestselling novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter. His screenplay for THE IMITATION GAME won the Academy Award and WGA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015 and was nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe. The film, directed by Morten Tyldum and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, received 8 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.

About the event

Real Men Read meets on the fourth Thursday of every month(Except for November and December!) at 7:00 pm in our Cold Spring branch meeting room. We read various fiction titles ranging from classics to modern sci-fi, as well as non-fiction including history, biography, and popular science.

Check out ALL our programs in our online newsletter, https://www.cc-pl.org/connections

Please note any accommodation requests in the Special Needs section of the registration form. If you wish to attend via Zoom, or have any other questions, please contact Dave Anderson at danderson@cc-pl.org

Cold Spring Branch