Make Mad the Guilty

The Trial of the Next Century

Jason Verne is an All-American Hero. As the first man to set foot on Mars after a solo journey into space, he quickly became a familiar figure in every living room. His good-will and human courage won over the hearts of many, including the daughter of world-famous televangelist, Timothy Grayson. His meteoric rise didn’t end there. While settling into the limelight with his wife and new baby Timmy, he became the perfect candidate to move into the White House.

But this kind of fame and power comes at a price. The midnight kidnapping of Timmy Verne leaves the world aghast. Who would commit the capital offence of breaking the Lindbergh Law?

Then veteran reporter Albert Choate notices suspicious parallels between the kidnapping of the president-elect’s only child and another event that occurred almost a hundred years ago—the Lindbergh Kidnapping. History seems to be repeating itself. Is this some sort of twisted coincidence, or could the Trial of the Century be occurring all over again for some other sinister purpose?

Make Mad the Guilty is a new edition of William Norris’s novel
The Gonzago Principle, which first published in December 2001.
The story stretched from the ’80s through what he considered the
near future, 2012. The author’s imagination of what would come to
pass in coming years did not align fully with reality, and so this
book has become something of an alternate history against the
author’s original intent. Norris set out to place the Lindbergh Trial
in a new context that would help readers understand just how
shocking and unjust were the circumstances of that infamous
history. We defer to our readers to judge the result, and beg pardon for what has become the language of a man in an era brought to a close by dramatic cultural shifts over the past two decades.