A classmate tells police that Jacob had a knife and a motive.

Andy is taken off the case, and his rival in the prosecutor’s office takes over. However, his son soon admits that he found the body but insists that he told no one for fear of becoming involved.

Andy, called to the scene by police, suspects a pedophile who lives nearby. One of Jacob’s classmates is found stabbed to death in a park near their middle school. The boy was often withdrawn and monosyllabic, but no more so than many other teenagers. Before that calamity, Andy and his wife, Laurie, had shared a comfortable, happy suburban lifestyle with Jacob, their only child. Landay’s Andy Barber, a prosecutor in Newton, Mass., has his world upended when his 14-year-old son is accused of murder. Turow’s Rusty Sabich was charged with murdering his lover. The two novels differ in one important regard. If you remember the surprise at the end of “Presumed Innocent,” be warned that the outcome of “Defending Jacob” is even more unexpected. Each book delves deep into the character of its protagonist and his family, and both offer caustic but informed indictments of our legal system. The similarities start with the fact that Turow and Landay are lawyers who began as prosecutors, and each novel is narrated by a prosecutor who finds himself in grave legal trouble.

I don’t think Landay’s novel has quite the elegance or gravitas of Turow’s, but it’s an exceptionally serious, suspenseful, engrossing story that deserves and should achieve a large audience. In the publicity material for William Landay’s “ Defending Jacob,” its publisher and several advance readers liken the novel to Scott Turow’s “ Presumed Innocent,” arguably the finest of American legal thrillers.

Defending Jacob by William Landay