The John Wood Case

It's a Wonderful Life is a movie about a man named George Bailey who discovers, in the love of his neighbors, how much good he's done in the world. Now imagine that George Bailey turns out to be an embezzler. That's the issue at the core of The John Wood Case, a remarkable novel about the moral crisis that besets a small town in Iowa shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, when it emerges that the community's leading citizen is not at all what he seemed. John Wood himself is the mystery at the heart of the swirling emotions and imperatives that his friends, neighbors and employer must navigate in coping with the scandal. Nobody is hit harder by the revelation than Wood's cherished son Philip, who is about to graduate from the local high school as valedictorian. The tale is brilliantly handled from every perspective by the late Ruth Suckow, possibly America's most unjustly forgotten writer. Originally published in 1959 and set half a century earlier, The John Wood Case will strike readers today as timeless-and irresistible.