Make Me Believe is a unique book: part crime novel, part non-fiction chronicle, part memoir, part reportage, part love story. In addition to my own death row interviews with the real Toronto Patterson, I use actual court documents, actual AP stories and other primary documents throughout the story as a way of engaging the audience in a participatory reading of the book that raises the stakes and lifts the veil that often alienates non-fiction readers from fiction.
The book begins in the court room in 1995. The first 20 pages consist purely of actual witness testimony from the original trial. The voices of these people -- everyone from family members to the police to his best friend who was also the star witness -- map the day of the murder based on what they witnessed with their own eyes. From there the story moves forward to the fall of 2002, a month after the real Toronto Patterson's execution. I put myself in the place of my protagonist and wondered, what if instead of going on with my life after interviewing him in prison, I'd dropped everything, headed to Dallas and attempted to figure out what really happened? In this sense, the entire story is based on a series of "What if?" questions that, taken together, interrogate the easy, accepted narrative (Toronto was a drug dealer, drop out and thug who murdered three people in cold blood) with a contrasting but by no means implausible narrative (Toronto was an incorrigible product of his environment, but he was not a murderer and there was more to the story that the DPD and D.A. didn't want to be bothered with) that still demands that the reader draw her own conclusions.
My aim was to approach the telling of the story from a skeptical point of view, one that offers facts and thereafter challenges the reader to figure out for herself what she believes happened. To that end, my protagonist, a young, struggling writer named Mosely Braun, is initially very cynical about his assignment to investigate Toronto's life and death. Only after mounting questions and doubts begin to gnaw at his conscience does he begin to believe that there may have been foul play. What he ultimately discovers is that Toronto's conviction might have been a matter of convenience rather than justice, and that the real murderer is still out in the world.
