In the early 1920s, Jake Witherspoon, a prominent DC attorney, moves his family back to his hometown to help his widowed mother. He also wants to give his family the chance to leave the turmoil of the big city and live a quiet, small-town life in the beauty of rural Arkansas, where living is easy and nothing much happens.
At least that was the plan. But to paraphrase Robert Burns, “The best-laid plans of mice and men / Often go awry.†Jake is not used to having his plans go astray—or anywhere he has not intended, for that matter.
So when he wakes up one quiet morning in his mother’s house in Hulet, Arkansas, and has no idea what has been happening in his own life for the past several years, he’s forced to piece together his painful old life and examine the man he was—and the man he wants to be.
Filled with mystery, suspense, and political intrigue, A Defect of Character is the powerful tale of one man’s journey from selfishness to self-discovery against a backdrop of deceit and murder in 1920s Arkansas.