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Review

There is a moment late in Charlie Donlea's Don't Believe It when the forensic pathologist Dr. Livia Cutty, having been brought in to consult on Sidney Ryan's documentary, works the numbers on two deaths separated by eight years and thousands of miles—Henry Anderson's plunge off Whiteface Mountain in 1999 and Julian Crist's fatal confrontation on St. Lucia's Gros Piton in 2007. She calls Sidney and says simply: "If this girl hasn't walked down the aisle twice, she's the unluckiest person in the world, or I'm looking at the same killer." That an axiom—two boyfriends dead by falling off a mountain bluff in the same lifetime demands a new investigation—is the governing intelligence of this fiercely plotted thriller. That the novel then builds that axiom into a documentary-within-a-novel, and uses it to ensure the wrong person goes to prison a second time, is the mark of a book that understands that its own form is complicit in the justice it critiques. This doubled understanding—structural, procedural, and moral—makes Don't Believe It something more devious than a legal thriller. The novel is a five-hundred-page argument that every act of public exoneration contains within it the seed of its own denial.

The book constructs this argument through an intricate set of nested narratives. In 2007, Grace Sebold is convicted in a St. Lucian court of first-degree murder for the death of her fiancé Julian Crist. Ten years later, documentary filmmaker Sidney Ryan—whose three previous films freed the wrongfully convicted—arrives on St. Lucia to investigate, having read over a hundred letters from Grace proclaiming her innocence. Sidney's real-time documentary series The Girl of Sugar Beach becomes a ratings juggernaut, climaxing in the forensic demolition of the prosecution's case and a seven-minute judicial exoneration. But a retired NYPD detective named Gus Morelli, recuperating from cancer-related leg amputation in a rehab facility, binge-watches the series and recognizes a pattern: Grace's high-school boyfriend Henry Anderson died in 1999 on Whiteface Mountain in conditions nearly identical to Julian Crist's death. The documentary's triumph, he suggests, may have set a guilty woman free.

The architecture is sophisticated in a way most legal thrillers are not. Donlea cuts between Sidney's investigation, the scripted episodes of The Girl of Sugar Beach (presented in italics, complete with on-screen narration and reenactment cues), Gus's slower-paced detective work from his hospital bed, and a set of "Jury Deliberation Day" interludes set fourteen months after the central action—each strand operating in a different temporal register and a different relationship to the truth. The documentary episodes are the novel's most canny device: by rendering them in italics and marking them with production-cue conventions ( *"Based on the interview with Grace Sebold," *"Based on the interview with eyewitnesses from the scene"), Donlea translates the novel's epistemological crisis into typography. The italics signify more than format; they designate the zone where truth is being actively produced, not simply reported. That the series becomes the vehicle for a wrongful conviction that echoes the very exoneration it celebrated is the novel's most cutting insight—it occurs when the italics stop, when the camera is off, when Sidney herself must decide whether to retract her own on-air verdict and whom she can trust to hear the retraction.

To its discredit, the novel's principal limitation is that it does not entirely trust its reader. The epigraph, from Alfred Hitchcock—"In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director"—is the kind of koan that primes an audience for a more literary pivot than the novel ultimately performs. When Grace Sebold tells Sidney that "every detective novel I've ever read is a mystery from the perspective of the detective… Our story, however, is a mystery from the perspective of the perpetrator," the structural intelligence exhibits the fault of announcing its own cleverness. But even this may be a strategic effect, part of a pattern in which every voice in the book—Sidney's, Grace's, Marshall's, the documentary's—volunteers an explanation that is then shown up as partial. The chant of the Ellie Reiser prosecution's signature line—"If she did it in her past, it won't be her last"—is the novel's version of a verdict: a neat, unforgettable phrase that, once broadcast, can convict anyone.

The forensic spine of the novel—the paddleboard oar analysis, the organza fibers, the love-lock fracture matching, the Pro-Line orthotic shoeprint—is a meticulous clinic in what the procedural thriller does best. Dr. Livia Cutty's cadaver and Synbone skull experiments are the kind of richly textured scientific argument that earns the trust established by Donlea's research-heavy acknowledgments page. When Cutty declares, "There is no oar on this planet that could possibly have caused Julian's skull fracture," and identifies organza (nylon) fibers matching a satchel used to hold the lock, the novel earns its reader's conviction through the sheer weight of anatomical detail and morgue-closet physicality. The repurposed medical examiner's facility, the use of the Le Fort fracture classification system, and the OCME protocols create a plausible forensic world built on the genre's most trustworthy conventions.

What makes Don't Believe It more than a skillfully plotted thriller that flips the wrongful-conviction narrative into the wrongful-exoneration narrative is the chessboard-like intelligence with which it positions its antagonist. Marshall Sebold, Grace's younger brother, is introduced as a wheelchair-bound, brain-injury survivor whose poverty of movement would seem to disqualify him from speculation. The novel withholds until very late that the same neurological condition that traps Marshall in a chair also gifts him strategic focus—at the chessboard, "his curled wrists and stiff fingers magically unfolded as he gripped the pieces." The chess pieces are, in the architecture of this book, a weapon—the Lladró porcelain chess case is the implement Marshall uses to bludgeon Sidney Ryan when she makes the mistake of playing chess with him alone. That the murder weapon is also the signature of his disability (the arms that can't feed him can still swing a porcelain case) is the engine of the novel's reversal. It repurposes the genre convention—the least-likely suspect—into an argument about how vulnerability can be instrumentalized: a child who saved his sister's life through a bone-marrow transplant can, the same year, kill any man he perceives as displacing him in the sibling relationship, and require that sister to spend a decade in prison covering for him.

But the novel is in the position of releasing that devastating last-act reveal into a plot that belongs not to it but to Gus Morelli. Morelli is the most ragged and interesting character in the book—a retired detective with cancer, an amputee who loses his leg near its opening, a man watching the documentary from his bed in a rehab facility like the reader watching from a couch—and his introduction into the narrative marks the axis around which the novel pivots from Sidney's confident executive production to a darker, lonelier kind of investigation. His letter to Sidney ("I believe you've made a great error with Grace Sebold") is the plot's third-act engine. His later declaration to the imprisoned Ellie Reiser—"I don't believe it"—is the novel's proper closing image. That a man dependent on an iPad, physical therapy, and morphine can diagnose the error that a twenty-person production could not is the book at its most sentimental and its most structurally satisfying.

The plotting has consequence because the thing Donlea is chasing isn't a twist for its own sake but a thicket of systemic questions the twist illuminates. The documentary that freed Grace Sebold is never renounced by the novel. The science that raised the doubt—Livia Cutty's analysis, the fiber evidence, Gus's pattern recognition—is never revealed to be a hoax. Instead the novel forces a harder claim: the same institutional instruments that produce a just exoneration can, without warning or modification, assemble into a murder machine. The fictional documentary series The Girl of Sugar Beach follows the real-world template of Making a Murderer, Serial, and The Jinx—named explicitly in the novel's own script—but it pushes past their conventions to enact a darker speculation: if film can free the innocent, it can also convict the innocent in the very act of freeing the guilty.

The novel's deepest limitations are in its secondary characters, who can feel like chess pieces themselves—their arcs so tightly bound to the puzzle-box that they don't live beyond the revelation. Grace's friend Ellie Reiser, the OB-GYN whose televised conviction occupies the book's late interludes, functions less as a character than as a cipher destined to occupy the cell the mystery demands. Daniel Greaves, the college ex whose size-thirteen foot briefly makes him a suspect, and his wife Charlotte Brooks Greaves, the ur-anxious figure of the bride whose wedding set the whole disaster in train, are barely more than vectors. And though the Ellie Reiser trial scenes are a bleached, procedural mirror of the show-trial justice the novel censures, the book never asks whether Grace, whose complicity deepens across a fourteen-month coda, is redeemable. The novel knows Marshall is a killer; it never decides whether Grace is a co-killer or a witness muted by a child's promise. That ambiguity is arguably an effect rather than an omission—the book's formalism makes a place to debate it—but a novel that builds such a baroque system of investigation might be expected to examine the difference between covering for a brother and concealing a crime.

Gus Morelli's final road trip, his embrace of Ellie's hand through the glass partition at the Metropolitan Detention Center, and his declaration that he doesn't believe the jury's verdict are steeped in the private-eye tradition—the loner who refuses the institutional ending and keeps the file open. That this road-trip coda curtails on a cliffhanger—a 25-year-old cold case partially solved but still pending—is the novel's commitment to a basic distrust of self-satisfied closure. "I don't believe it" carries the obligation that the documentary's own signature line—"If she did it in her past, it won't be her last"—cannot. It also signifies the exhaustion of the cold-case tradition, the restoration not of closure but of labor, the demand that the detective keep working.

Who should read this novel? Anyone who has ever watched a true-crime documentary and wondered what the camera didn't capture. Anyone drawn to the contrarian impulse that made The Girl of Sugar Beach-style investigations culturally ubiquitous. Read it for Donlea's polygraph of the wrong-machine: an exoneration system built on media, a justice system reliant on public opinion, and a documentary form that can produce the truth it is paid to discover. And if you finish the book unsettled rather than soothed—Ellie Reiser's murder trial still an image in your mind, the book's "I don't believe it" refusing the conclusive verdict—Donlea, to his credit, has landed the novel where he means to.

Notable Quotes

The blood was a problem. I knew it as soon as I felt it spit across my face. It streamed from his hairline and ran along his jaw until it dribbled onto the granite bluff, first in sporadic red blots, like the leading raindrops of a coming storm, and then in a continuous stream, as though a spigot had been plugged into the spot on his head where I had struck him and had opened wide. It was an error in judgment and strategy, which was a shame because up to now I had been perfect.

The novel's opening lines, narrated by the unnamed killer describing the murder of Julian Crist on the bluff of Gros Piton — murder, planning, deception, perfectionism

To kill someone required perfection, timing, and luck. I hoped all three were with me this evening.

The killer describing the premeditation required for murder in the prologue — premeditation, strategy, violence

I've exhausted the appeals process. It is different here than in the States. I've learned the St. Lucian justice system well over the last decade. There are no more loopholes to find, and no more formalities to follow. From this point forward, I can count on only one thing to help me—a re-examination of the evidence. Without it, I will spend my life here.

Grace Sebold's first letter to Sidney Ryan, written from Bordelais Correctional Facility after ten years of imprisonment — desperation, innocence, hope, wrongful conviction

A lot has changed between Julian and me over the years that I've been here. He was everything to me. Now, he's this... thing. This voice in my head that gets me through tough days. He's a dark shadow in my mind that cries with me. I scream at that shadow sometimes, too, because I'm still angry. It's odd to consider, but I've known this spirit of Julian longer than I knew the man.

Grace describing her complex, contradictory feelings about Julian Crist during her interview with Sidney at Bordelais — grief, anger, love, imprisonment

The detectives did exactly what they're trained not to do. They picked a suspect first, and then looked for evidence that supported their theory. And the problem with investigating a crime in that manner is that any evidence they came across that didn't support their theory was ignored or discarded.

Grace Sebold describing the systemic failure of the justice system during her interview with Sidney — justice system, wrongful conviction, investigative bias

The dirty little secret is that if the prosecution wants to convict someone badly enough, all they have to do is make the most farcical accusations they can think of, make many of them, and make them often enough to sway the jury.

Grace Sebold critiquing the prosecution's tactics during her trial and how media narratives shape public perception — media, justice, prosecution, narrative

They decided early on that Grace Sebold was guilty, and then set out to prove it. Tried to make everything fit that narrative. From what I read, they decided that a murder on a small island is bad for business. Especially if a local islander murdered a U.S. tourist. An American killing an American? Not so much of a problem.

Detective Don Markus explaining to Sidney how St. Lucian investigators selectively pursued evidence against Grace — police misconduct, selective investigation, forensics

You know what prosecutors say around here? Any D.A. can convict a guilty man, but it takes a special D.A. to convict an innocent one.

Detective Markus quoting a cynical saying among prosecutors about convicting innocent people — prosecution, injustice, cynicism

Bottom line? There is no oar on this planet that could possibly have caused Julian's skull fracture.

Dr. Livia Cutty's definitive forensic conclusion after her cadaver experiments disproving the boat oar theory — forensics, evidence, skull fracture, wrongful conviction

Can life really be started over? Can you simply turn the page in the notebook of life that has recorded your history and start writing a fresh story? If so, Sidney and her mother did it incorrectly. They either wrote the wrong story, or an unoriginal new story, or one that didn't properly allow them to forget the pages that had come before.

Sidney reflecting on her father in prison and how the past cannot simply be erased — family, guilt, reinvention, the past

Sidney was reluctant to accept the premise that agreeing to shoot a documentary could have such a profound effect on Grace's well-being. She was reluctant, perhaps, because Sidney knew if it were true, it was because she had given Grace hope. And the problem with evoking hope was that it led one of two places: salvation or damnation.

Sidney's internal reflection on the double-edged nature of giving hope to someone wrongfully convicted — hope, responsibility, consequences

If a girl's boyfriend dies by falling off a mountain bluff once, it's a sad case of bad luck. If that same girl has two boyfriends fall off a mountain in the same lifetime—that ain't luck—bad or otherwise. That's suspicious.

Gus Morelli articulating the statistical impossibility that connects the deaths of Henry Anderson and Julian Crist — pattern recognition, suspicion, investigation

I convinced myself that if I stashed everything about those cases away, then someday I'd come back to them and figure out what I missed. I've got a few from Wilmington, a bunch more from NYPD.

Gus Morelli explaining why he kept old case files in a storage unit throughout his career — obsession, unfinished business, detective work

I was after fame and fortune. You're after the truth. What I could never figure out until watching you over the last few months is that you don't have to chase one or the other. But you've got to start off looking for the truth, not the other way around.

Luke Barrington's unexpected advice to Sidney near the novel's climax, revealing vulnerability beneath his arrogance — truth, career, integrity, media

In the tiny world of chess, have you ever wondered how crappy it is to be a pawn? Their only role is sacrifice and diversion.

Marshall Sebold explaining to Sidney his view of chess pawns, metaphorically describing his own role in others' schemes — chess, sacrifice, manipulation, identity

When he plays chess, his physical ailments disappear. His muscles loosen and he can use his hands and fingers just as well as you or me. His speech improves and the slur disappears. The doctors explain it as tapping into a small portion of his brain that he can't access any other way than through the analytics of chess.

Grace Sebold explaining Marshall's neurological transformation during chess, the only activity that accesses his undamaged brain — brain injury, chess, healing, identity

Marshall needed Grace. He needed her now, and he'd rely on her more in the future. During their last 'life management' meeting with his therapist, Marshall's parents had discussed in-home care. Basically, a stranger coming into the home at some point in his future to bathe him, change his clothes, and help him get to the toilet.

Marshall's internal monologue revealing his motive for killing Julian Crist, showing the possessive logic of his damaged mind — dependency, fear, violence, sibling bond

She took the nylon bag that contained the Lladró chess set. It wasn't the first time Grace Sebold's brother stood in front of her, covered in blood and asking for guidance.

Grace's response when Marshall appears at her door covered in Julian's blood, echoing the same scene years earlier after Henry Anderson's death — complicity, loyalty, cover-up, siblings

Somewhere during the fifth hour of the Grace Sebold documentary, he decided that sitting in a goddamn hospital bed, feeling sorry for himself, was no way to chase down a woman who was guilty as sin.

Gus Morelli explaining why he felt alive again after discovering the connection between Julian Crist and Henry Anderson — purpose, aging, investigation, renewal

I don't believe it.

The novel's final line, spoken by Gus Morelli to Ellie Reiser in prison, delivering the title as both verdict and promise — belief, justice, wrongful conviction, persistence