Grimlock ♥ Ultra Magnus

Matt Murdock travels to Redemption Valley, Alabama with his intern, Constance, to defend a boy named Joel Flood.   Joel has been accused of killing a little boy named Bradley Gideon, along with two accomplices, his girlfriend Adrienne and her brother Saul, who is slow, and possibly has an intellectual disability.   This is brought up by many people, most notably the other lawyers, who come out and say he might be 'mentally retarded.'   It was a casual bit of ableism, but made sense in some ways.   (The town is in the South, extremely religious, and a tight knit community; there seems to be a lot of casual isms going around, and I'm not super surprised that this is one of them, to be honest.   It fit the character of the town, spoke of them, and in general the look wasn't so good.)

Throughout the trail, Matt has to fight off preconceived perceptions, and those biases have been going on since Joel was a small child.   It's not easy to unravel all that, or to tease out the secret shames that are relevant to the case.   Although Joel's mother offers the information when she's pressed, she certainly doesn't volunteer it beforehand.   (Then again, she's poor and travels to New York to get her son the best lawyer she can find, she doesn't hesitate talking about the abuse in her own family to save her, and I believe she would have volunteered the information if she'd though it would help him.   She's actually a character I came to care a great deal about, because she's kindhearted, and loves her family, and has overcome so, so much, but the way she thinks can be simple.   Not that she's simple, she just doesn't think her story will help because she thinks simply - and by that I mean a bit directly.   She's not thinking about biases, but about everything that's directly related to the case.)

This whole scenario has a lot of different elements that are slowly revealed, from the history of the accused, to how the victim's father is perceived in the town and what he does for the town, to the way that religion is approached in the town.   It's a slow and steady build, to the conclusion, and I loved it despite seeing the ending coming.  Or despite the fact that everyone trotted out evidence that wasn't in a bag. 

Which, okay, the town is presented as a little bit hick-y.   So I was going along with it until:

Oh, Matt, Matt, you know better!

Still, this was one of the most engaging Daredevil stories I've read.   Lovely, lovely, lovely jump back seven years ago, mining DDs untold backstories and then tying into the present.   Love!