Books by Grisham, John
- Grisham, John. The Brethren. New York: Island
Books, 2001. ISBN 0-440-23667-3.
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August 2001 
- Grisham, John.
The Confession.
New York: Doubleday, 2010.
ISBN 978-0-385-52804-7.
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Just days before the scheduled execution of Donté Drumm,
a black former high school football star who confessed (during
a highly dubious and protracted interrogation) to the murder of
white cheerleader Nicole Yarber, a serial sex offender named
Travis Boyette, recently released to a nearby halfway house,
shows up in the office of Lutheran pastor Keith Schroeder and,
claiming to be dying of an inoperable brain tumour, confesses
to the murder and volunteers to go to Texas to take responsibility
for the crime, reveal where he buried the victim's body (which was
never found), and avert the execution of Donté. Schroeder
is placed in a near-impossible dilemma: he has little trust in the
word of Boyette, whose erratic behaviour is evident from the
outset, and even less desire to commit a crime assisting
Boyette in violating his parole by leaving the state to
travel to Texas, but he knows that if what Boyette says is true
and he fails to act, an innocent man is certain to be killed by the
state.
Schroeder decides to do what he can to bring Boyette's confession
to the attention of the authorities in Texas, and comes into direct
contact with the ruthless efficiency of the Texas killing machine.
This is a story with many twists, turns, surprises, and revelations,
and there's little I can say about it without spoiling the plot, so
I'll leave it at that. Grisham is clearly a passionate opponent of
the death penalty, and this is as much an advocacy document as a
thriller. The victim's family is portrayed in an almost
cartoon-like fashion, exploiting an all-too-willing media with
tears and anguish on demand, and the police, prosecutors, court
system, and politicians as uniformly venal villains, while those
on the other side are flawed, but on the side of right. Now, certainly,
there are without doubt people just as bad and as good on the sides
of the issue where Grisham places them, but I suspect that
most people in those positions in the real world are conflicted
and trying to do their best to obtain justice for all concerned.
Taken purely as a thriller, this novel works, but in my opinion it
doesn't come up to the standard set by Grisham's early work. The
arcana of the law and the legal system, which Grisham excels in
working into his plots, barely figure here, with racial tensions,
a media circus, and a Texas town divided into two camps taking
centre stage.
A mass market paperback edition will be
released in July, 2011. A Kindle edition is
available, and substantially less expensive than the hardcover.
January 2011
- Grisham, John. The King of Torts. New York:
Doubleday, 2003. ISBN 0-385-50804-2.
- A mass market paperback edition is now
available.
March 2004
- Grisham, John.
The Litigators.
New York: Bantam Books, [2011] 2012.
ISBN 978-0-345-53688-4.
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Every now and then you come across a novel where it's obvious,
from the first few pages, that the author had an absolute blast
telling the story, and when that's the case, the reader is
generally in for a treat. This is certainly the case here.
David Zinc appeared to have it all. A Harvard Law graduate,
senior associate at Chicago mega-firm Rogan Rothberg working
in international bond finance, earning US$300,000 a year, with
a good shot of making partner (where the real gravy train
pulls into the station); he had the house, the car, and a beautiful
wife pursuing her Ph.D. in art history. And then one grim
Chicago morning, heading to the office for another exhausting
day doing work he detested with colleagues he loathed, enriching
partners he considered odious (and knowing that, if he eventually
joined their ranks, the process of getting there would have made
him just the same), he snapped. Suddenly, as the
elevator ascended, he realised as clearly as anything he'd
ever known in his life, “I cannot do this any more”.
And so, he just walked away, found a nearby bar that was open
before eight in the morning, and decided to have breakfast. A
Bloody Mary would do just fine, thanks, and then another and
another. After an all day bender, blowing off a client meeting
and infuriating his boss, texting his worried wife that all
was well despite the frantic calls to her from the office asking
where he was, he hails a taxi not sure where he wants to go,
then, spotting an advertisement on the side of a bus, tells the
driver to take him to the law offices of Finley & Figg, Attorneys.
This firm was somewhat different than the one he'd walked out of
earlier that day. Oscar Finley and Wally Figg described their
partnership as a “boutique firm”, but their stock
in trade was quicky no-fault divorces, wills, drunk driving,
and that mainstay of ground floor lawyering, personal
accident cases. The firm's modest office was located near a
busy intersection which provided an ongoing source of business,
and the office was home to a dog named AC (for Ambulance Chaser),
whose keen ears could pick up the sound of a siren even before
a lawyer could hear it.
Staggering into the office, David offers his services as a new
associate and, by soused bravado more than Harvard Law credentials,
persuades the partners that the kid has potential, whereupon they
sign him up. David quickly discovers an entire world of lawyering
they don't teach at Harvard: where lawyers carry handguns in their
briefcases along with legal pads, and with good reason; where making
the rounds of prospective clients involves visiting emergency rooms
and funeral homes, and where dissatisfied clients express their
frustration in ways that go well beyond drafting a stern memorandum.
Soon, the firm stumbles onto what may be a once in a lifetime
bonanza: a cholesterol drug called Krayoxx (no relation to
Vioxx—none
at all) which seems to cause those who take it to drop dead with
heart attacks and strokes. This vaults the three-lawyer firm into
the high-rolling world of mass tort litigation, with players with
their own private jets and golf courses. Finley & Figg ends up
at the pointy end of the spear in the litigation, which doesn't precisely
go as they had hoped.
I'd like to quote one of the funniest paragraphs I've read in some
time, but as there are minor spoilers in it, I'll put it behind
the curtain. This is the kind of writing you'll be treated to in
this novel.
While Wally doodled on a legal pad as if he were heavily
medicated, Oscar did most of the talking. “So, either we get rid of
these cases and face financial ruin, or we march into federal court
three weeks from Monday with a case that no lawyer in his right
mind would try before a jury, a case with no liability, no experts, no
decent facts, a client who's crazy half the time and stoned the other
half, a client whose dead husband weighed 320 pounds and basically
ate himself to death, a veritable platoon of highly paid and very
skilled lawyers on the other side with an unlimited budget and
experts from the finest hospitals in the country, a judge who strongly
favors the other side, a judge who doesn't like us at all because he
thinks we're inexperienced and incompetent, and, well, what else?
What am I leaving out here, David?”
“We have no cash for litigation expenses,” David said, but only to
complete the checklist.
This story is not just funny, but also a tale of how a lawyer, in
diving off the big law rat race into the gnarly world of retail
practice rediscovers his soul and that there are actually noble and
worthy aspects of the law. The characters are complex and interact
in believable ways, and the story unfolds as such matters might well
do in the real world. There is quite a bit in common between this
novel and
The King of Torts (March 2004),
but while that is a tragedy of hubris and nemesis, this is a tale of
redemption.
July 2012
- Grisham, John.
The Racketeer.
New York: Doubleday, 2012.
ISBN 978-0-345-53057-8.
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Malcolm Bannister was living the life of a retail lawyer in a
Virginia town, doing real estate transactions, wills, and
the other routine work which occupies a three partner firm,
paying the bills but never striking it rich. A law school
classmate contacts him and lets him know there's a potentially
large commission available for negotiating the purchase of a hunting
lodge in rural Virginia for an anonymous client. Bannister doesn't
like the smell of the transaction, especially after a number of odd
twists and turns during the negotiation, but bills must be
paid, and this fee will go a long way toward that goal. Without any
warning, during a civic function, costumed goons arrest
him and perp-walk him before previously-arranged state media.
He, based upon his holding funds in escrow for a real estate
transaction, is accused of “money laundering” and indicted
as part of a
RICO
prosecution of a Washington influence peddler. Railroaded through
the “justice system” by an ambitious federal prosecutor and
sentenced by a vindictive judge, he finds himself imprisoned for ten
years at a “Club Fed” facility along with
other nonviolent “criminals”.
Five years into his sentence, he has become the librarian and
“jailhouse lawyer” of the prison, filing motions on
behalf of his fellow inmates and, on occasion, seeing injustices
in their convictions reversed. He has lost everything else: his wife
has divorced him and remarried, and his law licence has been
revoked; he has little hope of resuming his career after release.
A jailhouse lawyer hears many things from his “clients”:
some boastful, others bogus, but some revealing secrets which
those holding them think might help to get them out. When a federal judge
is murdered, Bannister knows, from his
contacts in prison, precisely who committed the crime and leverages
his position to obtain his own release, disappearance into witness
protection, and immunity from prosecution for earlier acts. The
FBI, under pressure to solve the case and with no other leads, is
persuaded by what Bannister has to offer and takes him up on the deal.
A jailhouse lawyer, wrongly convicted on a bogus charge by a despotic
regime has a great deal of time to ponder how he has been wronged,
identify those responsible, and
slowly
and surely draw his plans against them.
This is one of the best revenge novels I've read, and it's
particularly appropriate since it takes down the tyrannical regime
which
incarcerates
a larger percentage of its population than any
serious country and shows how a clever individual can always outwit
the bumbling collectivist leviathan as long as he refuses to engage it
on level terrain but always exploits agility against the
saurian brain reaction time of the state.
The only goof I noticed is that on a flight from Puerto Rico to Atlanta,
passengers are required to go through passport control. As this is a
domestic flight from a U.S. territory to the U.S. mainland, no passport
check should be required (although in the age of
Heimatsicherheitsdienst, one
never knows).
I wouldn't call this a libertarian novel, as the author accepts the
coercive structure of the state as a given, but it's a delightful tale
of somebody who has been wronged by that foul criminal enterprise
obtaining pay-back by wit and guile.
November 2013