Zenith Man is a memoir written by attorney McCracken Poston, Jr. about his most interesting case. Alvin Ridley, his neighbor, had been accused of imprisoning, then murdering his wife. Poston was sure that Ridley had done no such thing, but the tiny Georgia town of Ringgold was swift to rush to judgment, and it took him nearly every minute of every day for nearly a year to research, then try his case.

My thanks go to NetGalley and Kensington Publishing for the review copy. This book was originally published in 2024, but this new version with an updated epilogue is available to the public now.

Ridley made his living as a television sales and repair man during the late 1900s, thus the title. His wife, Virginia, died, and his flat affect when he called the hospital to tell them as much set off all sorts of alarms, aided by Virginia’s sister, who had never cared for Ridley. When it came down to it, Ridley just wasn’t cut out the way that others in Ringgold were, and that made him difficult to defend. Poston comments, “I had put my all into helping the weirdest man in town.”

For starters, the man smelled dreadful; he hadn’t bathed or washed his clothes in at least a year. The judge had to have the courtroom fumigated after just a couple of days of the trial. (The case was then moved to a larger courtroom, one with windows!) He didn’t answer questions the way that others would. It took a solid week for just to get him to let Poston in the house so that he could see where Virginia had died; but once he did, he was even surer that Ridley was an innocent man.

(The promotional blurb from this book claims that this story resembles a nonfiction version of a John Grisham novel; it also claims to hold elements of “Rain Man” and Just Mercy. Overblown claims like these are a pet peeve of mine, and yet ultimately, I found myself occasionally wanting to call the defendant Alvin Radley, and I realized that this is because Ridley did, in fact, slightly remind me of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird.)

I won’t go into further detail about the case itself, as Poston has already done a fine job of that, but I will say that this memoir reads a lot like narrative nonfiction. I was deeply absorbed, and I found myself putting books by favorite authors aside until I could finish this one.

Highly recommended!