How must it feel to lose all connection with reality, questioning even the memories and knowledge that your own mind is presenting? The word confusion can't remotely cover it -- not for that realm of haze when you lose touch with your own grasp on reality.
"The Count and the Confession," a soon-to-be-released true mystery by John Taylor, touches all of these boundaries. And what is most terrifying and thrilling, Taylor forces readers to cover this hazy ground themselves.
"The Count and the Confession" tells the true story of Beverly Monroe, a Richmond resident tried and convicted for murder. Sounds simple enough, right? Except that there's nothing in this novel that can even begin to be called simple.
Beverly Monroe is a 50-something, successful patent analyst at Philip Morris. Nicknamed Mouse (by the murder victim, of all people), she is petite and somewhat demure, the living image of the lost Southern lady. The murder victim, Roger de la Burde, was an art collector who drank fine wine and wore even finer designer clothing. A fraud in more than one arena, de la Burde claimed to be a Polish count. He possessed and loved both women and privilege - his only regret being the lack of a male heir to take hold of his "dynasty."
The lust for a male heir, and the woman necessary for its conception, brought Roger and Beverly into a triangle with Krystyna Drewnowska. This younger woman, willing to sleep with Roger for the sake of a child, brought her bitter and jealous husband Wojtek into the picture as well.
Add Roger's children, along with several art collectors he had cheated throughout the years, and there's a full house of possible murder suspects. The truth suddenly seems a lot more like fiction that any author could ever make up.
By all accounts, including her own, Beverly was the first person on the scene after Roger's death - she found him lying on a couch with a bullet wound penetrating his skull. The gun was in Roger's own hand and she mourned his death immediately as a suicide.
In recreating the story, Taylor gives readers all the information needed to understand exactly why this might have been a suicide. Roger's manic personality, his shortage of available liquid funds, possible leaking information about his artistic frauds or even the recent news that the child Krystyna was carrying would be a girl. So much research went into the construction of this mystery that readers begin to feel as though even they themselves can completely accept Roger's death as a suicide.
But then Taylor presents the other side. Beverly was indeed the first person on the scene and police investigators discredited her only alibi for the preceding night, her son. Glaringly, she failed a lie detector test. The motive certainly existed - if you believe that Beverly considered herself jilted by Roger's relationship (financial and emotional) with Krystyna. And undeniably, Beverly even admitted to a partial confession under extremely dubious circumstances.
Where does the truth lie? Beyond all common perceptions, can the truth even be false? Taylor presents both sides of the story and of the ensuing court cases, leaving readers to find their own answers. Frustratingly, "The Count and the Confession" offers none of its own.
Taylor's book offers up a plethora of questions about the meaning of guilt and innocence in our society today. Can a person be convicted and imprisoned for a crime she did not commit? If you side with Beverly, then she was the victim. What power does the jury hold, and what if they're wrong? "The Count and the Confession" leaves readers questioning our judicial system even if they had never doubted it before.
In many ways, however, "The Count and the Confession" proves somewhat frustrating. The final page is turned, the reader puts down the book, and yet there are no answers. Only questions abound, questions that can never be answered because the very nature of a true mystery decrees that the author or narrator can never come down on one side over the other. Taylor does an immense amount of research and presents both the prosecution and the defense very accurately and indeed sympathetically. Readers are simply left to make that final decision themselves.
And they do. The publishing house promises that by the end of the book, every reader will have come to a conclusion of his own. They even predict that the results will be split practically 50-50, with half of the readers siding with Beverly and half believing that she was rightfully imprisoned. Make the decisions on your own - play the role of a jury member and take a place in America's historical judicial system. The answers don't come easily and maybe you'll put down this book completely jaded with our system of justice and the entire concept of truth. But the thought process is worth everything that follows.
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