Evan Hunter’s new novel is a fresh and powerful demonstration of the narrative gifts, the instinct for themes that concern us, the exuberant flow of invention that were responsible for the nation-wide impact of his best-selling Strangers When We Meet and The Blackboard Jungle. A Matter of Conviction is the story — told dramatically and in depth — of a sensational murder, the passions it arouses in a community, the people caught up in its tangled after-math. Above all, it is the story of the ethical dilemma imposed on the young prosecutor who values justice above the triumph of a conviction. The prosecutor, Henry Bell, is dedicated to his profession. He demands of himself an almost inhuman objectivity. He is intensely disturbed when the murder forces him to revisit the crime-breeding slum in which he himself was born, from which he escaped by his ambition and his integrity, and which he has almost, but not quite, managed to forget. How can he serve blind justice when the boys he must prosecute are an image — impossible to shut out — of what he might have been, when the newspapers scream for their blood and their neighbors stop at nothing to protect them, when his superiors insist on chalking up a conviction, and when — the final blow — his investigations bring him face to face with a woman who once had his happiness, as she now has his reputation, at her mercy. Henry Bell’s ordeal is superbly told in a novel that plunges the reader into a world of law and disorder, of crime and vengeance, of turmoil — emotional and political — of cold panic. In Henry Bell, Evan Hunter has created a memorable hero — a man of conscience and heart. When you finish his story you know that you would trust him with your life