- Grisham, John.
The Confession.
New York: Doubleday, 2010.
ISBN 978-0-385-52804-7.
-
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 