Author Description

What happens when we're confronted with a question for which there isn't an easy answer, just an easy excuse for not answering? When 24-year-old Toronto Patterson is executed in the summer of 2002 for a triple homicide committed at age 17, an obscure writer is asked by his would-be agent to write a book about him. Armed only with a recorder, case files, and a curiosity spawned by urgency, Mosely Braun steps off the plane in Dallas and into a perilous journey that hurls his own life in harm's way. Through it all, Mose undergoes a mythic transformation from doubt to belief, and from observation to action that is at once deeply spiritual and profoundly universal. Based on the true life and trial of Toronto Patterson, the last juvenile offender executed in the state of Texas before the Supreme Court's landmark Roper v. Simmons decision in 2005, Make Me Believe is an astonishing story of what happens when our pursuit of convenient justice runs roughshod over inconvenient facts. Using actual interviews with the accused, case documents, news articles and courtroom testimony, the novel blends fact and fiction to render a compassionate meditation on the power of conviction.