I’ve been on a jury once. I embarked on my civic duty with visions of Twelve Angry Men in my head --- the fantasy being that, as the Henry Fonda “holdout” character, I’d get 11 hotheads, cowards, opportunists and/or bigots to examine the evidence fairly and thoroughly. It was an anticlimax to discover that we were largely in agreement about the verdict.

The courtroom drama in THE HOLDOUT does bear some resemblance to Twelve Angry Men. The accused in that iconic 1957 film was a kid from “the slums,” while here he is a young African-American teacher, Bobby Nock. In both instances, a single juror persuades the others that there is reasonable doubt about the defendant’s guilt. In other respects, though, this thriller is thoroughly modern, the jury a cross-section of Los Angeles’s diverse population (old, young, gay, sex-addicted; pharmacist, grad student, fortune teller; Jewish, Korean, Latina, African-American). One juror observes that the others, despite their geographical proximity, “were entirely foreign to him…. All it took for people in Los Angeles to speak to their neighbors was for one of them to kill another.”

The basics of the case: Bobby Nock is accused of murdering his student, 15-year-old Jessica Silver, daughter of a prominent L.A. real-estate mogul (no body has been found, but she is presumed dead). These 12 disparate individuals, sequestered in a hotel over a very long five months, are tasked with deciding his fate. Maya Seale, a writer in her 20s, isn’t sure the evidence is decisive, and she is the lone juror to vote “not guilty.” In time, the others do the same.

"Moore keeps up a nicely brisk pace; the pages practically turn themselves, and the denouement is surprising yet satisfying."

Flash-forward 10 years: Maya is now a defense attorney, her naïve doubts as a juror replaced by a more sophisticated and cynical point of view. I liked getting inside her legally trained mind; her speculations feel “insidery” and plausible. Reluctantly, she joins the other jurors at the very same hotel for a reunion that’s the centerpiece of “Murder Town,” a true-crime TV series. One of the jurors, Rick Leonard, guilt-stricken, has spent the decade since the trial amassing proof that Nock was guilty after all. He promises the producers a bombshell that will blow the lid off the verdict. And, just to complicate things further, it turns out that Rick and Maya had an affair during the trial.

But before the big reveal, Rick is murdered --- in Maya’s hotel room. Now she is the one on trial. The scene is set for explosive events, and author Graham Moore is up to the job. He’s written two previous thrillers and is well known for his Academy Award-winning screenplay of The Imitation Game, the brilliant film about World War II codebreaker and gay martyr Alan Turing. Here, he has devised a wickedly effective plot that alternates between the present day --- Maya’s race against the judicial clock to identify the real murderers --- and flashbacks to the 2009 trial, told from the perspective of each juror. The dates are well flagged, so there’s never a confusion about when we are. Moore keeps up a nicely brisk pace; the pages practically turn themselves, and the denouement is surprising yet satisfying.

I must confess that I’m a sucker for trial-by-jury fiction. It is not only inherently suspenseful but, historically, a lens for making points about the society outside the courtroom: racism, sexism, corruption, class privilege. (In my own jury experience, I noticed, painfully, that the better educated among us were usually capable of convincing a stubborn but less articulate juror to vote our way.) In THE HOLDOUT, racism is certainly an issue, though not the issue. There are blatantly racist comments during the trial, but Moore’s integrated cast of characters avoids a reductive black-white breakdown. Both the defendant and his chief accuser, Rick Leonard, are African-American, and so are juror Trish Harold, an IT tech (both she and Rick resent the assumption that they’ll automatically identify with Bobby Nock because of their skin color), and Maya’s boss, big-deal lawyer Craig Rogers.

Then there is the surreal context of L.A. I was struck by Moore’s description of downtown, where a no-man’s land of “unkempt grass and concrete” now boasts gleaming new skyscrapers and a modern art museum built by none other than Lou Silver, father of the vanished Jessica. It is Rick Leonard’s theory --- actually, his doctoral thesis --- that one-way streets in L.A. and elsewhere are used by local governments, and by powerhouses like Silver, to maintain segregated neighborhoods. He also makes the point that L.A. is “built on a desert,” virtually all its plant species imported from somewhere else. The artificiality and wrongness of the city, along with the glamour, make an apt setting for a celebrity trial.

Moore highlights the tension between the media madness that surrounds the Bobby Nock case --- think O.J. Simpson --- and the jurors’ personal lives and moral sense. He emphasizes how the jury was publicly reviled for its decision to acquit, and how the 24-hour news cycle spreads rumor more than fact. More poignantly, he makes it clear that none of the jurors could let this traumatic experience go. For Maya, appearing on “Murder Town” means reuniting with the only other people who truly understand the pain and loneliness of the trial’s aftermath. At the same time, it makes her queasy: “She was selling her past, or at least the only part of her past that anyone cared about, which was the part devoted to someone else’s tragedy.”

Moore’s observations about the larger social and cultural setting add a certain depth to THE HOLDOUT, but sometimes they feel like mini-lectures. The author isn’t a great character builder, either; the melting pot of jurors seem like types. And the smooth progress of Maya’s investigations is hard to believe. Although a murder suspect herself, she has access to help from her law firm, and every fellow juror or witness she encounters is willing to bare his or her soul. Shouldn’t crime solving be messier than this? Shouldn’t she have hit a few dead ends?

Then again, dead ends don’t play well, and THE HOLDOUT, I thought as I read, would make a gripping small-screen drama. I guess I was prescient. According to the entertainment news site Deadline, a project based on the book is now in development at Hulu.