TV TIP

Jury Duty

Amazon Freevee

Somewhere far in the recesses of the streaming world lives Freevee, and it’s worth finding it just to locate this gem. The concept is a good one: an entire trial staged to prank one person. A completely fake trial, including courtroom, judge, lawyers, bailiffs and 11 of 12 jurors are all actors. One juror is not. It’s kind of a television experiment, which probably explains why it’s on something called Freevee and not NBC. The elaborate hoax ends up working because of our hero, Ronald. He wants to do the best he can. He is responsible, sincere and earnest, almost to a fault. I’m hesitant to say the show wouldn’t work without Ronald, but it’s fair to say it would be an entirely different show with someone else. He isn’t the butt of a joke; he’s the hero. The show goes the extra mile and becomes something else because of Ronald, and you really have to watch it to fully understand. Rather than being a juvenile prank show, which it is in a lot of ways, Ronald’s presence turns it into something warm and welcoming. If you’re anything like me, you’ll watch it in three days, think about it for the next week, and just maybe it will restore your hope in humanity. We should all be more like Ronald.

— Owen Poole

BOOK TIP

Hang the Moon

Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls’ “Glass Castle,” a memoir about her hardscrabble years growing up in a very dysfunctional family, remains one of my favorite books. I loved her novel “Half Broke Horses” as well. Her latest, “Hang the Moon,” didn’t capture me the way those tomes did, but that’s only because those earlier books set a very high bar. Here, a young woman named Sallie Kincaid is a strong, take-no-guff soul in 1920s Virginia. She grows up poor, after being ostracized by her wealthy father. She’s called back to the clan as a teen and eventually becomes a rum runner during Prohibition. The story is shot through with dramatic turns, and Walls develops a dynamic narrative. She does, though, go overboard with the sheer number of long-held secret connections; it almost becomes comical. Yet “Hang the Moon” works well as a tale of the haves and have-nots, feminism and family. And Sallie Kincaid is a charismatic heroine.

– Kristina Dorsey

BOOK TIP

God Is a Bullet

Boston Teran

Two decades ago when this book was published, I interviewed the author and wrote about it for The Day. I bring it up now because I just re-read what is one of the darkest and spookiest crime novels ever written. Bob Hightower is a policeman on the hunt for his missing pre-teen daughter. She’s been kidnapped by a Satanic cult. His only hope of finding these folks, who wreak havoc with hellish glee across the southern California desert and along the Mexican border, is to trust Case, a woman who’s a recovering junkie and was, at one time, a member of the cult. There’s much pulsing menace here and Teran writes with a disturbing authority. Read it now because a film of “God Is a Bullet,” directed by Nick Cassavetes, hits theaters June 23. You’ll want to have done your homework.

– Rick Koster