Poet and critic Maggie Nelson's The Red Parts is the piercing story of the murder of Nelson's aunt and the trial of her accused killer 36 years after the event. Blending a poet's passion and a journalist's cool eye, Nelson (The Art of Cruelty) has produced a distinctive story of an otherwise ordinary family's encounter with unspeakable violence.
Jane Mixer was a first-year student at the University of Michigan Law School when she decided to accept a ride with a stranger to her home in Muskegon in March 1969. She never made it past a cemetery a few miles from Ann Arbor, where her body, shot twice in the head and strangled, was found. It wasn't until 2004, when an unrelated DNA test connected retired nurse Gary Earl Leiterman to the crime, that this cold case was cracked.
Maggie Nelson is too wise to attach a facile label like "closure" to the end of the experience she and her family endured over the course of more than three decades. As the jury files out after rendering its verdict, she observes, " 'Justice' may have been done, but at this moment the courtroom is simply a room full of broken people, each racked with his or her particular grief, and the air heavy with them all." Murder trials efficiently serve to assess guilt or innocence, Nelson understands, but they only incidentally heal the wounds these violent crimes inflict on those who live on in their aftermath. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer