John Grisham: Favorites and Unfavorites

John Grisham was the first novelist whose entire bibliography I ever finished, though these days I must limit that to "adult" biblography, given his kid lawyer series.     Given that there are so many, I thought it would  be fun to list my favorites and unfavorites.   Not mentioned are many in the middlle, of varied quality.  The favorites are in chronological order, and the unfavorites are in stinklist order.    Over the years I've tried to re-read Grisham books from before the blog, and  I've linked to those with reviews.

 Favorites

A Time to Kill (1989): Grisham's first novel opens with an outraged father taking justice into his own hands after the men who raped and beat his child are acquitted by a racially biased jury.  The novel was mostly ignored until the success of The Firm gave Grisham real name recognition, but challenges the reader with the question of when it is appropriate to take justice into one's own hands. 

The Firm (1991): The first Grisham book I ever read, a crime thriller about a young lawyer who is accepted into an elite boutique firm, only to realize a few months in that they're an organ of the Mafia. 

The Pelican Brief (1992): It's been a long time since I read this one in high school, but I remember being fascinated by the idea of Supreme Court opinions.  The story tracks a series of deaths related to an explosive briefing about an endangered wetland (I...think?), and involves the New Orleans Mafia.

The Client (1993)   Again, it's been a long time since I read this one, but the story of a young boy stumbling upon a scene he wasn't supposed to see, and subsequently becoming an object of interest to both the FBI and the Mafia, protected only by a young attorney who focuses on child abuse,  is unforgettable. (....Grisham wrote quite a few Mafia related books early on,  I'm realizing...)

The Chamber (1994)  The Chamber is easily the most thought-provoking novel I read in high school.  Its plot involves a young lawyer taking on his estranged grandfather -- decades lost to  him-- as a client.  His  grandfather sits on death row, awaiting execution within the gas chamber after being judged guilty of a bombing which killed two children during the 1960s.   The Chamber is less a legal thriller and more of a novel wrestling with moral themes,  and reckoning with the past.   This novel made me think long and deep about the death penalty in high school, which is more than any bombastic political arguments could have done.

The Rainmaker (1995)  This duels with The Last Juror as my favorite, and it may not be an accident that they're both first-person novels.   Young Rudy Baylor, a bankrupt law school grad, stumbles upon a gold mine of a case while at a legal clinic. The novel turns into a genuine David vs Goliath story, and has the most comprehensive depiction of a legal trial from soup to nuts I've ever encountered.

The Street Lawyer (1998). A prosperous but unhappy big city attorney suddenly finds a way to find meaning in his life when his office is held hostage by a homeless man with a mission.

The Brethren (2000).    I debated including this one on here, because I hate the ending. The setup, though, is fun. Three disgraced judges locked up in a federal pen are using their time in exile to scam up money for themselves by targeting closeted gay men for blackmail. When they accidentally snare a man handpicked by the CIA to be the next president  things get interesting.  I mostly enjoy this one for the execution of the scam; I found the mundane details of how the judges passed messages and money back and forth  interesting.

The King of Torts (2003)    Ah, this one is fun. A young attorney becomes a hotshot multimillionaire when he  is invited into the world of mass torts, but it's definitely  a rise and fall situation.   The novel is interesting in that while Grisham uses it to talk a little politics -- as he usually does --  there's no hard line here.

The Last Juror (2004).   One of Grisham's more interesting novels; this one follows a couple of decades in the life of Willie Traynor,  a weekly newspaper publisher, and through his press the life of Clanton, MS as Vietnam and suburbanization set their sights on American small towns.    The story is tied together through a legal case involving a brutal murder, the memory of which keeps revisiting the town.

The Unfavorites

The Associate,  2009.   A rather obvious attempt to make a story out of  the Duke  lacross team scandal, but instead of focusing on that,  Grisham uses it to dive into some conspiracy thriller involving blackmail and defense contracts. I enjoyed it at the time, although the ending was...underwhelming. It has not improved in memory. 

Grey Mountain,  2014.    A premise with great potential is squandered by feckless lead character bobbing around like flotsam in a story that goes nowhere and serves only to bludgeon the reader with a message:  Big Coal is Bad.

The Appeal, 2008.    The first Grisham novel I read and wished I could have the time and money spent on it back.  It's a depressing tale of a mass tort case and crooked elections.

The Racketeer (2012): a bumbling lawyer who drifts into even more bumbling fraud morphs into a criminal mastermind while in prison,  lying even to the reader.  An unbelievable and obnoxious potboiler.

Rogue Lawyer (2015): nonstop despair, brooding, and violence, with a premise entirely too much like  Connelly's The Lincoln Lawyer. Easily my most unfavorite, and if it weren't for the fact that I receive Grisham books as Christmas gifts by people who would be annoyed if I disposed of them, I would have set fire to this one as soon as I read it. Absolutely The Worst. 



 I'm not sure what to make of the fact that I apparently enjoyed Grisham's earlier works far more than his recent ones.    I've changed as a reader, I'm sure,   just as I'm sure Grisham has changed as a writer:  when he releases 1.5 books every year,     a decrease in quality over time isn't that surprising.  Even if ideas don't run out, passion can.

The Reckoning

The Reckoning
© 2018 John Grisham
432 pages

On an otherwise unremarkable autumn morning in rural Mississippi,  an idolized war hero traveled from his farm into town, visited the preacher, and shot him. The sheriffs found the shooter patiently waiting for them on his front porch, where he offered neither resistance nor explanation.  The entire town is dumbfounded to see two of its favorite sons turn on one another so inexplicably, and in a way that will destroy the families as the criminal trial and then a wrongful death trial wear on.  The trials here are quick and brutal; instead, the meat of The Reckoning lies in an account of the Bataan Death March and the plight of two children whose lives and homes are destroyed by their parents' decisions.

Say what you will about The Reckoning, but it's decidedly different from anything else Grisham has written, set completely in the 1940s and featuring an aspect of the Pacific War (American resistance in the Philippines to Japanese occupation) few will be familiar with.  The first third of the novel addresses the immediate consequences of the preacher-killing, before shifting several years prior, to tell the story of a country farmer turned jungle commando, who barely survived the Bataan death march and escaped to take up with American and Filipino soldiers in the mountains who were engaged in guerilla warfare against the Japanese occupational forces.  The novel then shifts back to the aftermath of the killing and the trials, which....is about as uplifting as reading about the Japanese torturing and starving thousands of men after Bataan. That bit in the middle about the resistance was nice, though.

I can't deny that I enjoyed reading The Reckoning -- I only received it Christmas morning and now write this  less than 24 hours later,  like a few other Grisham reads over the years.  The first two thirds are unexpected, and with all the Faulkner references (characters are constantly reading him, and the writer himself appears as a minor character) I thought Grisham might produce a completely unexpected conclusion. Why did the hero shoot the preacher?  Was this the hero's way of immolating himself for not living up to his own legend, and taking another secret ne'er do well with him?  Was the preacher a Japanese sympathizer?  In the end it comes down to a very old story, which is unsatisfying given how depressing the novel was as it reached the conclusion. 

While I was appropriately intrigued and riveted by The Reckoning, it's mostly melancholy.

The Rooster Bar

The Rooster Bar
© 2017 John Grisham
352 pages

The third year of law school is supposed to be the easiest, but for Todd,  Mark, and Zola...eh, not so much. Their best friend just committed suicide, leaving behind a tangled web of conspiracy on his apartment wall. Zola's Senegalese parents were just picked up by customs for deportation,  the guys' families are likewise unstable, they're all unemployed, and between them they owe over half a million dollars in student loans.   Not that all that debt has given them anything in return:  half of their school's graduates fail the bar exam, a fact they've picked up on much too late. They're all a semester away from graduation, and after that loom the licensing exam and impossible loan payments   With the banks holding all the aces, what's left to do but kick over the table? 

 Todd and Mark have an idea:  stop going to law school, and start going to the courthouse to hustle cases, small fry that they can do cash jobs for, under assumed identities.  With all of the lawyers crawling around DC, like rats in a landfill, who would know they didn't have licenses? They'll use their last student loans as startup money, hit the streets, and see if they can't scrape up a living.  They were headed for bankruptcy anyway, so why not go for broke? The Rooster Bar follows the two guys (and Zola,  who is distracted by her family and dubious about the scheme to the point that she never nets any cases) as they embark on a life of deceit, fraud, and confidence games,  though one of them has a bigger fish in mind. The same company that owns their diploma mill also owns the bank they borrowed the money from, through the usual legal shell game that protects them from antitrust suits.  The guys would love to take vengeance on the racket, not just for ruining their lives but from driving their friend to suicide. Surely there's a way.

Well, yes. It seems implausible, but as Grisham points out in his afterward, he played fast and loose with the facts for the story's sake.  ("Especially the legal stuff,"says he.  That's nice to know when it's a novel about the legal profession.)   Although  this is a fresh story -- and an interesting one, as readers see the characters having to learn the ropes -- the way it develops is not too dissimilar from The Litigators, in that some characters' ambitious idea goes...awry in a Wile E. Coyote fashion. Just like the Coyote, however, repeatedly falling off of cliffs, blowing up bombs next to their heads, and launching themselves into the stratosphere  doesn't stop Todd and Mark from rebounding.

The Rooster Bar is more memorable than The Whistler,  but I'd still put it near the bottom of the second tier, as far as Grisham books go. Good title, though.

Camino Island

Camino Island
© 2017 John Grisham
290 pages

Mercer Mann thought she'd reached the bottom of her career. After publishing early, and young, she's floundered ever since, and keeps herself eating -- and keeps the creditors for her $60,000 in student loans at bay -- by teaching English lit to disinterested freshmen.  But now...she's lost even that. She's officially an unemployed and soon to be homeless writer. Happily, however, a discrete insurance firm who is trying to track down some priceless and recently stolen manuscripts from Princeton University has a job for her.   They want her to return to her childhood home of Camino Island, Florida,  and -- under cover of taking the summer off to write a book -- get to know one Bruce Cable, owner of Bay Books, owner of many seersucker suits, don of the local literary set, and suspected architect of a twenty-five million dollar heist.  Her mission: get as close to him as possible, find out if he's their man, and obtain any information that would help recover the books.

Camino Island is a confused novel, despite having one of Grisham's more interesting setups. It opens with a heist and closes with the police and lawyers, but  the seventy percent in the middle reminds me a little of The Last Juror, in that the  meat of the story lays in the goings-on of a community of eccentrics, in this case all writers, publishers, or (in Bruce's case) those associated with the bookstore. Bay Books is the community center, housing not only the bookstore but a popular cafe, and despite its size it attracts all manner of authors, from Stephen King to Scott Turow.  Mercer's spy mission involve fewer tuxedos and gadgets and more trying to hold her daiquiries during long dinners in which writers  gather to encourage or mock one another as they struggle to get their stories out. As Mercer gains more acceptance with the locals, she begins learning about the rare book trade -- and that, combined with the fact that so many of the characters are book-lovers, makes Camino Island of immediate interest to those of us who genuinely love books and literature.  The appeal of the novel is mostly in the setting, however, as none of the characters have a full "story": they're merely characters with small stories that  intersect at times, but don 't really cohere into some grand narrative. Mercer, the closest thing we have to a main character, disappears in the last few chapters of the book, and I almost didn't mind. Frankly, the only character who is remotely interesting in Bruce, who turns a struggling bookstore into a community center and does most of the legwork that keeps it alive by working there six days a week -- despite being wealthy with shady friends.

Although Camino Island's organization leaves much to be desired, I enjoyed the literary theme enormously. I received it as a Christmas gift this morning and just finished it off, so it was a good story...just a weirdly organized one.

The Whistler

The Whistler
© 2015 John Grisham
384 pages

The offices of the Board of Judicial Conduct rarely see excitement.  Responsible for investigating claims of judicial abuse and defrocking offenders, their rowdiest target has been an old lech who forgot which bar  he was a member of and attempted to seduce various women in the courtroom. But now a disbarred lawyer who represents a shadowy chain of confidants claims to have information that might expose the most corrupt judge in American history.  According to the ex-lawyer, the mysterious robed one is in bed with a swamp gang, skimming millions from an Indian casino.    After a series of deaths and disappearances, lead character Lacey Stolz and the BJC are forced to call in the FBI to help bring the errant judge and the conspiracy to justice. (Which they do, rather quickly.)

Although I faithfully read the latest Grisham book every year,  I've been enormously disappointed in most of his recent works -- so much so that I didn't even look forward to trying this one, I merely cracked it open for tradition's sake. I'm happy to report that the book was not awful; it was even moderately enjoyable. Huzzah for mildness!   Execution-wise there's not a like to brag about: forgettable characters,  flat dialogue, and repetition. (Seriously, Lacy Stolz mentions how glad she is not to be married so many times that I hope Grisham's wife doesn't read this and think he's complaining vicariously.)  On the bright side, the Board of Judicial Review is fresh ground for Grisham, and the extensive time spent on an Indian reservation is new as well. (Grisham did poke into this area in Ford County, but that was only one story.)   Grisham also stays technologically relevant by having one character monitor a house break-in through an app on her phone.  Best of all, though, the characters are not the abysmally awful cretins of Rogue Lawyer.  They even have friends who like them.

The Whistler is a very vanilla sort of book; tasty enough not to put down, but not so compelling that it consumes the reader. It's genuine airplane/vacation reading, with a rushed ending in case boredom sets in.

"The covers are the same? ....make the new one red. They'll never know."

Rogue Lawyer

Rogue Lawyer
© 2015 John Grisham
344 pages

("Wait for 2016", I said.  What can I say?)

Rogue Lawyer ranks with The Appeal as one of John Grisham's most cynical and bitter pieces of fiction. Its lead character, Sebastian Rudd, is vaguely reminiscent of  A Time To Kill and The Last Juror's Lucien Wilbanks,  a long-haired warrior for justice who lives for picking fights.  He works for the dregs of the legal system -- not the poor, but the despicable,  like a wannabe gangster who had his last lawyer killed. Part of this is idealism, but more pervasive is a contempt for practically every aspect of the legal system.   Rogue Lawyer begins with a series of disjointed sections, some of which finally converge into a more novel-worthy tale, though none of it makes for edifying reading.  Rudd spends the entire novel immersed in degradation. His clients are satanists, crimelords, and human traffickers, and when he is not with them he is attempting to manage a young San Salvadoran cage fighter, striking deals with petty crooks and pettier civil servants, or trading bitter courtroom blows with his ex-wife, as they work on their joint project of raising an emotional trainwreck of a child who will, if he survives being kidnapped by his father's enemies to settle a score, have serious issues.  The majority of adults in this novel  spend their time plotting to  manipulate,  shake down,  or physically injure one another. The ending is suitably unsatisfying,. While it's not as bad a novel as The Racketeer,   Grisham did street law much better in The Street Lawyer,  which saw ordinary decency matched against the inhumanity of the legal system. The problem here is there is little decency or humanity to be found. It's nonstop violence, despair, and brooding, with the one moment of hope in the bleak collection of tragedy coming when the main character ponders packing up and leaving his life behind to go play golf.  Aside from a lead lawyer who is worlds away from Grisham's usual main characters,  Rogue doesn't impress.

Gray Mountain

Gray Mountain

© 2014 John Grisham

384 pages

 In late 2008,  New York’s financial sector and the economy built around it began hemorrhaging jobs. Among the casualties were the junior ranks of  lawyers at Samantha Kofer’s firm,  including herself.  Reduced from six figures to none in a blink of an eye, the only thing Samantha was left with was the promise of health insurance – if she agreed to a year of pro bono work while the economy healed.  Leaving New York behind for a small mining town in Virginia,  Samantha discovers  a different world, one of grinding poverty amid the mesmerizing beauty of the mountains.  Having never stepped inside a courtroom before,   she is introduced to the spectre of ordinary law: helping real people with real problems. Every aspect of Gray Mountain is one Grisham has played with before, in The Street Lawyer, The Rainmaker, and The Pelican Brief;   despite those successes, however, the story never takes off here;   there are pieces of a good story, but no structure. Throughout, Samantha's attention is taken up with a handful of small cases, while an epic trial builds in the background. The suspense bursts with a plot twist that could have gone places, but instead leaves Samantha leading the reader in circles as she tries to make up her mind -- which she never does.  The chief problem is that Sam isn't especially active in the story; she is passive and ambigious; things happened around her and to her, but she doesn't know what to do herself, so she just drifts back and forth with the tide until the sun does down and the novel is over, with the great conflict never having been realized.  If the aim of the novel was to depict a young professional adapting to strange new circumstances and developing some measure of self-direction, the execution is lacking.  The only passion here is Grisham's own: he's  no stranger to political themes in his work, but Gray Mountain is as subtle as a strip-mine in indicting Big Coal.  If the denizens of town aren't dying of blacklung, they're being run over by coal trucks, struck by flying  boulders from the mines,  or being driven into bankruptcy by the coal companies' lawyers. The economic devastation of the Appalachians -- the tragic ruin of its people and the mountains --  is a story that needs to be told but having Snidely Whiplash as a villain won't invite anyone to consider people's plight here; it's a case of preaching to the choir and running off the visitors.  The backdrop and some of the minor threads go a long way to making this of interest, but Gray Mountain remains second-rate. 

Sycamore Row

Sycamore Row
© 2013 John Grisham
464 pages

 I have been less than impressed with John Grisham’s books in recent years; The Racketeer made me suspect Grisham or his publishers were merely milking the success of his name.  Sycamore Row, however, is a return to the Grisham of yore; set in his fictional Clanton, Mississippi, the site of many of his better novels.  A direct sequel to his first novel, and building off many others, Sycamore Row is good work, a legal thriller and a story of restoration and forgiveness.

Sycamore Row picks up only two years after the climax of A Time to Kill, in which Jake Brigance defended a black father who meted out shotgun justice to two white hooligans who beat and raped his young daughter. No one expected Brigance to triumph, not in a town like Clanton where racial tensions ran deep. But he did,  and the storied reputation he earned as  a progressive lawyer of integrity earned him the job that begins in Sycamore Road. On a fine Sunday morning, a local businessman, Seth Hubbard, is found hanging from a tree on his property; the next day, Brigance receives a letter from the man appointing him the executor of his will, a handwritten document that cuts out the man's family and leaves his enormous fortune to...the maid.  The black maid.  Once again Jake is thrown into a controversial trial that some want badly to turn into a good ol' race war. Jake  has no interest in that kind of legal battle;  the Hailey trial saw his house and dog perish in flames set by the Ku Klux Klan.

Although the premise sounds a bit much like The Testament -- where another rich old man left a handwritten will that disinherited his family and dumped the fortune on someone who no one had ever heard of, namely a missionary in South America --  the legal battle turns into a historical mystery that comes into light only late in the novel. The legal question of whether Hubbard was sane enough to produce a legally valid will is resolved not by trial arguments, but by historical fact as the characters struggle to discover what Seth Hubbard knew. The characters include not only Jake, but other Clanton favorites like Harry Rex Vonner, a cranky if wise divorce lawyer, and Lucien Wilbanks, who is the last of a noble clan of gentry, a disbarred southern scion with a taste for sour mash and a proud member of the NAACP -- just to rile folks up.  Sycamore Row's  enmeshment with the other Clanton novels will make this work especially attractive for Grisham readers, especially those like myself who've been disappointed by works like The Associate and The Racketeer.   The presiding judge is Reuben V. Atlee, whose own will will cause a stir in  The Summons which it neglects to mention $3 million sitting around in boxes in his basement. Even Willie Traynor, who owned the newspaper whose story was told in The Last Juror, makes a few steady appearances.

For those not enamored of the greater Clanton story, Sycamore Row is still superior to many Grisham works because it's not idle entertainment.  Grisham develops a theme of forgiveness throughout, and the final resolution is magnificent. There's no preachiness, no lectures from the main characters nor wisdom dispersed from a town savant; forgiveness and restoration are written into the character's very actions.  I was spellbound, and hope Grisham returns to Clanton again.

Calico Joe

Calico Joe
© 2012 John Grisham
208 pages

It's not every day that dear old dad tries to murder your childhood hero, but such a thing happened to Paul Tracy. His dad was Warren Tracy, an abusive drunk playing for the Mets and rapidly pitching himself out of a job. His hero? Joe Castle, from Calico Rock, Arkansas, a man who had never struck out. A phenomenon behind the plate, "Calico Joe" was the greatest rookie to play the game...until the young, legendary hitter met the angry, bitter pitcher who wanted to teach the young squirt some manners. Hence, violence.  What happened between the two ruined both of their careers and drove Paul to avoid America's game for the next thirty years. But now, with Warren on his deathbed, Paul hopes to effect his reclamation...by arranging a meeting between the two aging players.

John Grisham has dabbled in sports books before, to some success; inevitably for a southern writer, previous forays into the athletic fields were football books. Here he writes on the baseball diamond, and has produced in Calico Joe a short and syrupy sweet novel heavy on character drama rather than plot twists. I read it just after Christmas, and its theme of redemption and forgiveness fit the mood; this is a fast-flying tale that's more of a extended short story than a meaty novel.

The Racketeer

The Racketeer
© 2012 John Grisham
340 pages

Malcolm Bannister is a largely unsuccessful lawyer who was imprisoned by an overly aggressive government prosecutor when he accidentally turned  his law firm into a shell company for a shady crook who needed to launder a lot of money.  Two years in a minimum-security prison camp are sufficient to turn him from a struggling bungler into a mastermind, and the tangled web of deception he weaves begins when Bannister approaches the FBI with information that can help them solve the execution-style murder of a federal judge. Although at first the plot seems straightforward -- Bannister turns state's evidence and is then ostensibly pursued by the man whom he helpd indict's friends -- by novel's midpoint Bannister reveals himself to be an unreliable narrator, whose machinations and ultimate motive are as confusing to the reader as they are to his victims. It's as if upon pulling the first rabbit out of his hat, Bannister was so impressed with himself that he kept doing it -- "And another! And another! And another!"  The resulting frenzy and self-congratulatory antics quickly grew tiresome. The Racketeer is somewhat reminiscent of The Partner, in that the main character is in the middle of an extensive and extremely complicated con that will make him very rich, but unlike him in that instead of wanting to be left alone,  Bannister goes out of his way to entrap people and  cackle at his brilliance. I hoped earnestly that things would go awry, but every part of his plan falls into place in this light-action 'thriller'  loaded with unsympathetic characters, leading to a smug conclusion that made me wonder if I could get the receipt for this book and return it.

I'll let the author's note speak for itself..

"Almost nothing in the previous 340-odd pages is based on reality. Research, hardly a priority, was rarely called upon. Accuracy was not deemed crucial. Long paragraphs of fiction were used to avoid looking up facts."

The Racketeer has earned the distinction of being my least-favorite Grisham novel among all of his adult fiction.  It has the merit of an interesting cover, though. I do like hats.

The Litigators

The Litigators
© 2011 John Grisham
385 pages

The Litigators may be unique among John Grisham's work in that from the start, it's written as a comedy. The lead character (David Zinc) intoduces himself to the story by having a nervous breakdown on his way to work and taking refuge in a local bar, where he happily drinks the day away before stumbling into a seedy two-man firm of ambulance chasers and declaring that he'd like to be their new associate.  His two new employers, Figg and Finley, border on the pathetic themselves: one is an on-again off-again drunk who can't stay out of rehab, and the other is on his fourth marriage and a fan of get-rich-quick schemes that always result in catastrophe.  While they're not keen on taking on a new hire, one is about to engage the firm in a mass tort action. It seems there's a bad drug on the market, and every lawyer with an eye for the future is trying to get a piece of the pie by piling on. They could use a hand in getting their 'boutique firm' involved, and so Zinc becomes the third man in their unintentional comedy troupe.

Think of The Litigators as The King of Torts meets The Street Lawyer, delivered as a comedy of errors and peopled by two of the Three Stooges. Everything that can go wrong does: by mid-novel they're facing a perfect storm that promises disaster.The lead character is so fundamentally decent, though, that the reader is left wincing at the fact that the poor guy is facing a fate that is the legal equivalent of falling into a woodchipper. But the Litigators isn't simply the story of a horrifically-executed trial:   Zinc finds perverse value in his new life, enjoying the fact that instead of slaving away in a corporate tower working in international finance, he's actually helping people...and so bizaarely, in a novel where the usual fate of Grisham's trials and heroes are reversed,  the ending is unambiguous and (for me) satisfying.  Look for it if you're in a mood for a quick and comedic read with some mild legal-thriller action thrown in.

The Confession

The Confession
© 2010 John Grisham
418 pages

In 1998, the small Texas city of Sloan was horrified when a high school belle vanished without a trace. She'd been abducted, abused, murdered, and buried by a serial rapist named Travis Boyette.  Outraged and horrified, the town eagerly pursues its first suspect and sends him to Death Row -- but Boyette was not accused, condemned, or even suspected. He walks free while an innocent boy, another high school star, is sentenced to death on the basis of a transparently extracted confession and the word of a jealous goon.  Nicole's body was never found, nor was there any physical evidence to tie young Donte to the crime.  Almost ten years later,  as Donte's execution date draws near, Boyette stumbles into the office of a Lutheran minister with a troubled conscience. He's dying, troubled by his conscience, and knows all too well that in less than a week, a broken young boy will be killed for someone else's crimes.

Keith Schroeder never anticipated being the confessor of a serial rapist, but he's gripped by the Cause: if he can convince the legal system that they may have the wrong man, Donte will live and possibly even be exonerated. While Donte's lawyer Robbie Flak files every last-minute appeal he can, Schroeder and Boyette race against the clock, violate Boyette's parole for another crime, and rush to the backwoods of Missouri where Boyette claims to have buried the body. The odds are long that they will concede: the prosecuting attorneys, judge, and governors are all hard men proud to see Donte on his way to Death Row: to them,  his death will be a triumph, a sign to all that Texas' lawmen are doing their job to protect good white people from the black menace.

Black menace --? Oh, yes. Donte is black. His jurors were all white, and his sloppy conviction and impending execution have Slone teetering on the precipe of a race riot. There's no lack of dramatic tension in The Confession once the race to Missouri against a ticking clock starts in earnest.  I for one received the book on Christmas morning and began reading it later that evening after a day of family festivities. I continued reading well into the night, , but I could not put it down.  The book was racing towards its conclusion, or so I thought, and I was carried towards dawn by the fast pace. Every time I thought the tension was nearing a breaking point, Grisham threw another spanner in the works. He hasn't had this spellbinding effect on me in years.  The conclusion is a mixed bag, not unusual for Grisham:  while he rarely writes stories of the 'bad guys' winning, he's not particularly keen on writing stories of the 'good guys' winning, either --at best, the victories are Pyrrhic.  Like most of Grisham's novels, this is not idle entertainment; he uses his characters' plight to address a point. The Appeal criticized judicial politics, for instance, a tack also taken up here along with revisiting The Chamber's theme of the effectiveness and morality of the death penalty.  More directly, The Confession attacks the prosecution's eagerness to convict and kill:  human lives should not be weighed in the balance by politicians eager to perform for emotional audiences.

The Confession is an emotionally turbulent thriller of human conscience set against malevolent institutions that recommends itself far more than other releases in recent years like The Associate.


Related:

• The Innocent Man, John Grisham
• The Chamber, John Grisham
• The Appeal, John Grisham

The King of Torts

The King of Torts
© 2003 John Grisham
472 pages

"Why won't they just throw money at me to make me go away?"

"Now you're thinkin' like a real mass tort boy!"

Clay Carter is an underpaid and overworked Public Defender, providing legal services to the poor and needy. The job attracts idealists, but Clay isn't one: he took it out of desperation when his father's law firm collapsed and he needed a job. It impresses no one, least of all his girlfriend's nouveau-rich parents who made it big in development and are now firmly entrenched in the world of the rich and vain.  From the shadows, a Mephisto-like character named Max Pace offers Clay an opportunity to enter that world. If he's willing to do a little clean-up work for Pace's client -- offering millions of dollars to a particular group of company's victims in exchange for silence -- his fees will be $15 million.

$15 million is a lot of money for an ambitious guy like Carter, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. If all goes well, Pace's own firm can give Clay the inside dirt on a harmful product of their competitor's. Clay can sue the rival firm and sack them for millions and give Pace's firm an edge in their on-going competition. Thus Clay is introduced to the world of mass torts. The formula for winning is simple: pour millions into television advertising to scare those who have taken the product into calling the law firm and being tested, gather a few thousand victims of the product, and sue. The numbers and potential for damages will encourage the sued firm to settle quickly, the combined fees will net Clay millions of dollars for doing almost nothing in the way of litigation. It isn't law, exactly: more like a shake-down with paperwork. He's thus catapulted into the world of the jet-set -- and the jets are real, as he learns when he attends a mass-tort lawyer convention and enters casual debates about the merits of the new Gulfstream jets. The anonymous public defender once sharing a dismal apartment now frets about boats, jets, houses in the Bahamas, and clothing for his newly-acquired supermodel arm candy.

The King of Torts might be subtitled The Rise and Fall of Clay Carter, for Carter is nothing more than a high-stakes gambler on a winning streak, and sooner or later the bubble is bound to burst. Clay's path to financial success has left a trail of short-changed clients and ruined lives behind him, and a tenacious lawyer who specializes in attorney malpractice is soon on his trail.

The King of Torts is one of my favorite Grisham works to read, although it's not as finely-crafted a story as The Last Juror or The Rainmaker. Carter's rise and fall are dramatic: the money goes to his head, but he's never completely corrupted by it. As with a few other of Grisham's works, Torts also has a point as he uses it to air the mass tort community's dirty laundry. He does this not out of sympathy toward the pharmaceuticals and manufacturing firms which are taken down by these lawyers, but with an eye toward the future: if abuses like Clay's continue, government reform may muzzle the ability of consumers to take action against irresponsible producers in the future.

On that basis I'd recommend it, but Torts is also light fun. I picked it up for some leisure reading between more serious works and couldn't quite put it down.

The Summons

The Summons
© 2002 John Grisham
373 pages

When Professor Ray Atlee returned to his family home in Clanton, Mississippi to discuss his ailing father's will, he found two surprises waiting for him. His father, an elderly judge who even in retirement remained a pillar of the community, lay dead in his study -- only two hours parted from life. The judge left dozens of boxes of legal files, enough Confederate memorabilia  to stock a museum, and over three million dollars stashed away in boxes. The untimely death and the discovery of the money are staggering to the professor, who knows his father to be both grossly underpaid and as great a philanthropist as any man:  the judge gave money to anyone who needed it, so how did he manage to acquire such an immense fortune? And why isn't that fortune in the bank -- why is it hidden in these boxes away from public view?

His father's latest will named Ray the executor of the estate, but he's not willing to reveal the millions to the world, for the cash stinks of some kind of impropriety. Where could it have come from?  He begins to discreetly investigate the matter, hoping to find that his father earned this fortune legitimately through trading on the stock market or even gambling in casinos -- but the money remains inexplicable. No one else seems to know anything about the money, but Ray soon begins receiving threatening mail and phone calls and his home is ransacked. Someone else wants the money -- and they want it enough to kill.

The Summons is more of a mystery thriller than a legal thriller, although the law is an irreplaceable element of the plot. Set partially in Grisham's Ford County and partially in Charlottesville, North Carolina,  the book offers character drama, an interesting mystery -- how does an honest  judge get three million dollars? -- and a little moralizing on the effect of large amounts of cash on human behavior: Ray has no intention of reporting to the IRS, and not just because he's concerned for his father's reputation. The book is also a teaser of sorts for Grisham's The King of Torts, one of my favorites. I enjoyed re-reading The Summons: like The Brethren, it's an interesting diversion from Grisham's usual legal fare, and the setting is an old favorite.

The Last Juror

The Last Juror
© 2004 John Grisham
355 pages

As [Padgitt] was about to step out of the witness box and return to the defense table, he suddenly turned to the jury and said something that stunned the courtroom. His face wrinkled into pure hatred, and he jabbed his right index finger into the air. "You convict me," he said, "and I'll get every damned one of you."
"Baliff!" Judge Loopus said as he grabbed for his gravel. "That's enough, Mr. Padgitt."
"Every damned one of you!" Danny repeated, louder. 

If you forced me to choose a favorite John Grisham work, I could manage to choose The Last Juror with some conviction. Not whole conviction, mind you, for I'm prone to picking up  my well-thumbed copy of The Rainmaker and reading a chapter at random. The two works, probably not coincidently both written in the first person, constantly jockey in my mind for first place. Like many of Grisham's works, The Last Juror's background plot takes place within the realm of law, as a small Mississippi town is shaken by the rape and murder of a young woman in full view of her children. The prime suspect is Danny Padgitt, a young member of the Padgitt crime family, a secretive and close-knit clan of bootleggers, car thieves, and drug dealers who operate from a small island formed by a near-circular bend in the Mississippi river. Unlike Grisham's other works, the main character is only a spectator to the trial. His name is Willie Traynor, and he's a 23-year old lapsed university student who has acquired the bankrupt local paper through a rich aunt. Traynor is interested in turning the weekly newspaper into a goldmine, and the shocking trial provides an instant boon in his first few months as owner and publisher.

The Last Juror is  notable for its setting and scope: while other Grisham works take place within the span of a few months, The Last Juror spans an entire decade -- and that decade happens to be the 1970s, the era of Vietnam, Nixon, and Civil Rights.  While the dramatic murder trial's lasting effect on the town provides the overall plot, the substance in between its appearances makes the book special for me, for Grisham  explores the development of a small town in this tumultous period from the perspective of an outsider (Traynor is from Memphis, which makes him a 'northerner' in his readers' eyes). Grisham uses the timeframe to comment on the culture and history of the rural south from the viewpoint of a local newspaper: religion, politics, funerals, football culture, the response to segregation,the  rise of big box stores, and the like all receive Traynor's curious attention and amused, concerned, or affectionate commentary. The book is in a way a loving tribute (and a mild roasting) to Grisham's childhood background. This is the book that made me curious about the effects of chain stores on local economies, for instance. A ten-year span also provides plenty of time for character development, as Traynor ages and becomes part of the town's fabric of interesting characters. The town is, by the way, Clanton -- a favorite setting of Grisham's, set in his often-visited and fictional Ford County. Characters from other books (Harry Rex Vonner and Lucien Wilbanks from A Time to Kill, most notably) appear, sometimes extensively and sometimes only as part of the background.

The Last Juror for me is the most interesting of Grisham's works for its novelty: none of his other works are like this. As much as I like The Rainmaker, it is at its essence only a legal thriller like much of his other works. The Last Juror is commentary on ten years of the history and culture of a small southern town, breaking from Grisham's typical formula and an easy reccommendation to those who are familar with Grisham's legal thrillers but who have tired of them, or who have never really experienced his works.

The Brethren

The Brethren

© John Grisham 2000

384 pag

               From within the confines of a minimum security prison, three convicted judges spin a web of deceit and extortion across the nation. Relying on a corrupt lawyer with addictions to shuttle mail and handle the money, these three men – termed ‘the Brethren’ --  seek out closeted gay men via classified ads in alternative magazines. Posing as young gay men themselves to earn the marks’ trust, the judges then threaten to expose their victims to their wives if they  do not pay upwards of $100,000. These closeted men have no recourse but to pay, for explaining the circumstances of their extortion means revealing parts of themselves they've kept in hiding. The Brethren have little to lose from their scheme, but financial security following their eventual release from prison to gain – and so they write their letters and prey on their victims, watching their bank accounts grow and contemplating future lives of leisure.

    They might have continued to spin their webs for years, but they chanced to ensnare a young politician named Aaron Lake, favored by the CIA to be the next president of the United States. Lake isn’t just favored by the CIA: he was hand-picked by the Director, who has subsequently funded and helped manage Lake’s bid for the office. Fearing the potential rise of a Russian strongman, the Director wants a man willing to double funding for the US military to ward off potential threats – and he does not take kindly to the idea of three felons preying on his man. The Brethren have no idea that the CIA is involved, and their scheme may either result in the biggest payoff ever – or three occupied slabs in the penitentiary morgue.

    I read this first years ago, and have read it a couple of times since then. I picked it up over the weekend intending to read a little at lunch, but found it too interesting to put down. The novel is set during the 2000 presidential election – an obvious Dubya stand-in is mentioned as Lake’s potential running mate, and his ‘liberal’ opponent in November is the sitting vice president. Brethren, like The Broker, is a thriller with its roots in the legal system but which involves global politics:  his CIA director appears in several other books. This is a breezy read with an interesting start, although the story fades to conclusion rather than coming to an satisfying end.

The Chamber

The Chamber
© 1994 John Grisham
676 pages

As a high school senior, my second John Grisham read resulted from rescuing a battered copy of The Chamber from my library's discard pile. The librarian warned me against reading the book, saying that it was "dark". The titular chamber is a gas chamber (formerly) used by the state of Mississippi to execute prisoners condemned to death. One such person in Grisham's world is Sam Cayhall, a longtime member of the Ku Klux Klan, convicted for taking part in the Civil Rights Movement-era bombing of a law office and the resulting death of two children. As Cayhall enters his last month of life, he is an angry old man with no friends except for his death row companions. The highlight of his life is that he has recently been able to fire his Jewish lawyers, whom he hates: he is now resigned to go to his death alone. But then a young and wholly inexperienced attorney arrives to see him, one representing his recently fired firm and one who reminds him of someone -- his son, who fled to California twenty years ago and changed his and his family's name to rid themselves of the legacy of Sam Cayhall.  This new arrival is in fact Sam's grandson, back in Mississippi after his father spirited him away as a toddler. He's come to meet his grandfather -- and to rescue him from his fate.

Although The Chamber is advertised as a legal thriller -- and although the law is a persistent element of the book -- it often fades away into background, and the dominating theme of the book is one of reconciliation. Sam and his grandson Adam must come to terms with one another and Sam's own past, for not only did his hatred destroy his and his victims' own lives, but it continues to haunt the live of his family. Adam is utterly disturbed and ashamed of his family's deep roots in the Klan, and his interest in his grandfather's reclamation is in a way an attempt to come to terms with his family's dark past. Sam is one of Grisham's more agonizing characters, initially developed as a hateful old man for whom death seems "righteous", but one who is humbled as his mortality becomes increasingly obvious. As Adam struggles to find a legal means of freeing his grandfather from Death Row or at least in postponing his execution, Sam has to make peace with himself and begins tugging on the reader's sympathy.

The Chamber is one of Grisham's better works. Like Grisham's first work, A Time to Kill, it is much more serious than his latter works which seem to be more about entertainment than  challenging the reader with a moral dilemma. I read the book initially as a very conservative high school student, one with predictable opinions on everything from abortion to the death penalty, but even then this book made me think. At nearly seven hundred pages, there's a lot here to go over, but the interpersonal conflict and theme of the book lend it easily to my reccommending it. If you give Grisham's works a pass for being too much like pop fluff, try The Chamber.

Ford County: Stories

Ford County: Stories
© 2009 John Grisham
320 pages

I was delighted to receive John Grisham’s Ford County: Stories for Christmas. I’ve been a Grisham reader since reading a battered paperback copy of The Firm years ago, and many of my favorite works (The Summons and The Last Juror, to name a couple) of his are set in fictional Ford County, Mississippi. Grisham has returned to Ford County and its county seat of Clanton for a novel approach -- a book that is not a novel. Ford County is a collection of seven short stories, most of which are written in the third-person. Grisham’s intent with this book was to spotlight some of the more varied characters in Ford County, and there are many. There are a few lawyers inside -- Grisham is known for his legal thrillers -- but the law is not a dominant theme in the book.

None of the stories failed to delight me, and the variety is genuine. Some are silly, some are serious, and most contain the mild level of author commentary typical of Grisham. He develops a new host of characters, bringing back only one character (Harry Rex Vonner) from his previous Ford County stories.This collection should please Grisham fans, particularly those who enjoy short stories and who have not been too discouraged by The Appeal or The Associate, both of which Ford County betters. I suspect it will become one of my Grisham favorites, alongside The Last Juror and The Rainmaker. Here's a preview of three of Ford County's stories:

• "Casino": After his wife leaves him, Sidney becomes an inadvertent professional gambler and gets revenge on the man who his wife left him for by breaking the man's casino. 
• "Blood Drive":  Three good ol’ boys pile into a pickup truck intending to drive to Memphis to give a fellow Ford County man blood. Hilarity begins ensuing when they drive past a liquor store. The result sounds like a perfect “This one time, we got so wasted….” story. 
• "Funny Boy":  one of Ford County’s outcast sons comes home to die of AIDs. Rejected by his family, he’s taken care of in his final days by an older black woman who finds his lifestyle suspicious but learns to care for him. This one of the more heartwarming stories in the collection. 

Skipping Christmas

Skipping Christmas
© 2001 John Grisham
227 pages

One of my own personal Christmas traditions is to read John Grisham's Skipping Christmas. It's a tradition I've maintained every year since owning the book, although part of the tradition is not reading all of it. Skipping Christmas was one of the first books Grisham wrote outside of the legal thriller genre, and makes for a light, fun, seasonal read.

Skipping Christmas is the story of Luther Krank, who -- after a particularly grating trip downtown to buy pistachios and an expensive brand of white chocolate for one of his wife's many holiday projects -- wonders just  how much Christmas costs him. After calculating his total expenditures -- the tree, gifts, cards, massive party -- and arriving at the respectable sum of $6100, he has a mad idea: why not skip Christmas? His daughter Blair just started a two-year hitch with the Peace Corps, so why not take himself and the wife on a ten-day Caribbean cruise for half the price of Christmas -- blowing off all of the trappings of the season? Why not say "no" to buying meaningless and often useless gifts, to parties with lechers and gossips, to the turmoil of shopping for supplies downtown?

And so, while his neighbors spend thousands of dollars on turkeys and cashmere sweaters, the Kranks work on their tans and diet to make their bodies swimsuit fit. While their neighbors invest hours of work in decorating their homes, the Kranks dance around in their living room to reggae music, knowing that on Christmas day they will be headed for warm sunshine and tropic islands -- and when they return, utterly relaxed, they will have no bills to pay, no decorations to take down, and can enjoy knowing that this year, they said "no" to being overwhelmed by the holidays: they did it their way.

The reason I typically stop reading the book 5/6s of the way through is because on Christmas Eve, Luther's beautiful plan goes awry and he must begin biting bullets. I suppose it's a story about the futility of trying to resist such entrenched traditions, but so help me if I don't root for Luther every single time. As I said, it's a fun little read -- worth reading in the next couple of weeks while Christmas songs still echo, or next year when the frenzy begins again.

The Associate

The Associate
© 2009 John Grisham
373 pages

I will admit to taking John Grisham for granted. Like old t-shirts and Star Trek, when I begin a Grisham novel I do so with the expectation that I will enjoy it. Grisham rarely disappoints. Although he is known for his legal thrillers, in recent years his new releases have been away from the courtroom. He returned to legal thrillers last year with The Appeal, but it seemed different from the novels of old and was (in my experience) reacted to negatively. Although Grisham's novels rarely end with everyone living happily ever after, the ending of The Appeal struck readers as..."wrong", somehow. It is one of the few Grisham books that I didn't really enjoy -- but with The Associate, Grisham has returned to a similar style.

This book, like most Grisham novels, is written in the third-person. The book's main character is Kyle McAvoy, the son of a small-town lawyer who has little interest in making a career out of working for big-league Wall Street lawyers. The book begins one night at a community basketball game, at which McAvoy is coaching. As he watches the game and yells at the kids, he sees a rather obvious man watching him -- a man dressed in the apparel of a government agent. Unnerved, he tries to leave the gym after the game via a back entrance, but is apprehended regardless. The man -- a "Bennie Wright" -- asks Kyle for ten minutes of his time.

Kyle soon realizes that Bennie holds power over him -- evidence that links him and three of his friends to rape allegations from their early college days. While Kyle is perfectly innocent, the evidence shown to Kyle makes him realize that there is a very real possibility two of his friends aren't, and that their indiscretion may ruin him. Bennie knows Kyle's fear, and exploits it: in return for a guarantee that there will never be a trial about this issue, Bennie wants Kyle to accept a job at a major Wall Street law firm and gather information for him. Kyle is thus stuck between Scylla and Charybdis: he can risk the ruin of his name by helping Bennie and violating his future clients' trust, or he can risk the ruin of his name by allowing the federal investigation to go on. Neither are attractive possibilities, but the latter ruin is far more likely than the former.

Even as Kyle bites the bullet, he learns that Bennie is not who he claims to be. There is something far greater going on here than an FBI investigation: defense contractors are going to (legal) war with one another over the design and production rights of a major piece of military equipment. Not only are the investments of the United States government at risk, but there are foreign governments like China, Russia, and Israel willing to interfere in the trial -- and Kyle is being made to take part in this madness, to help unknown people by stealing information from his law firm and delivering it to his handlers.

Kyle, knowing unpleasant things are bound to happen to him if he just passively cooperates, begins planning his extrication from the situation he's been trapped in from the very start. Although the book is primarily about him, Grisham occasionally gives the reader a rest from Kyle and follows Baxter Tate -- the alleged rapist -- instead. Tate's problems with alcohol and descent into the world of rehab and relapse provide occasional breaks for the reader and eventually connect to Kyle's problems.

The case of the lacrosse players from Duke entered into my mind, and I would wager that their trial in 2006 gave Grisham inspiration. The book is somewhat similar to The Firm in that a brilliant young antagonist quickly finds himself stuck between two impossible-to-accept scenarios, who has to find his own way out of the mess. The book's ending chapters were pretty gripping for me, although I did have a "Wait, really? That's it?" moment at its final conclusion. It's almost as if the ending isn't properly realized. The book doesn't have the "untold story" quality of The King of Torts or the criticism of The Street Lawyer or The Rainmaker, but it was pretty enjoyable for me all in all.

(Please note that The Associate is not a prequel to The Partner.)