The book recounts attorney Thurgood Marshall’s defense of four young black men who were accused in 1949 of raping a white woman in the town of Groveland, north of Lakeland and east of Dade City in Lake County, where the violent, racist sheriff Willis V. McCall controlled the levers of justice. Associates thought it was suicidal for Marshall to wade into the “Florida Terror” at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight — not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall’s NAACP associates involved with the case and Marshall had endured continual threats that he would be next. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times described Devil in the Grove as a “must-read, cannot put-down history.”