Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial by Janet Malcolm

The New Yorker reporter looks at a 2009 murder trial in Queens to show how factors like bias and likability can affect the pursuit of justice.

(Yale, $25)

Sometimes in murder trials, it’s not truth but “the most consistent story” that wins, said Rachel Cooke in the London Observer. In her “disquieting” new book, New Yorker reporter Janet Malcolm casts her keen eye on a 2009 murder trial in Queens, N.Y., to illustrate how factors like bias and likability can affect trial outcomes. Convicted of hiring a hit man to kill her estranged husband, Mazoltuv Borukhova, a young doctor who had been battling the victim for custody of their 4-year-old daughter, was almost certainly guilty. Yet despite a trial’s finality, Malcolm is left with a “nagging sense of unease” about the ambiguities that litter the state’s pursuit of justice.

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