Grisham has been churning out thriller s since his wildly successful The Firm. I've read The Pelican Brief and The Client and saw the corresponding movies. Impressive on both counts. My wife has read some of his other follow-ups and wasn't too thrilled, said they seemed like quick attempts to cash in on the momentum generated by his first few hits. If John would just take his time, there's no reason he couldn't hit again.
Rating: ****
If you haven't read it or seen the movie, where have you been? This is the most talked-about legal thriller since Presumed Innocent by Turrow. A young man wins a high-paying attorney job and finds himself caught between the mob and the FBI. Read It!
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Rating: ***
Grisham's latest legal thriller tells the story of Patrick Lanigan. He had been a young partner in a prominent southern law firm. He had a beautiful wife, a new baby, a bright future. Then one winter night Patrick was trapped in a burning car. The casket they buried held nothing but ashes.
Patrick watched his own funeral, then fled. A fortune was stolen from his ex-firm's offshore account. And Patrick ran, covering his tracks--but now they've found him.
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Rating: ***.5
My second-favorite John Grisham book, next to The Firm. A young law student, Darby Shaw, prepares a brief-based on nothing more than a legal shot in the dark-after the assassination of two Supreme Court justices. But someone else reads her brief-someone willing to kill to destroy evidence of an unthinkable crime.
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Rating: ***
A boy witnesses a suicide and hires a lawyer to protect him from a murderous mob seeking to silence him. Wonderful chase scenes, characters you care about, vintage Grisham.
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Rating: **.8
They are at the center of a multi-million-dollar hurricane-12 men and women who have been investigated, watched, manipulated and harassed by high-priced lawyers who will stop at nothing to guarantee a verdict. Now the jury must make a decision in the most explosive civil trial of the century, a precdent-setting lawsuit against a giant tobacco company. But only a handful of people know the truth-that this jury has a leader, and the verdict belongs to him.
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Rating: **.5
A gloomy tale about life on death row for a man no one could possibly care about. The publisher, Bantam Double Day Dell, describes it:
In the corridors of Chicago's top law firm-Twenty-six-year-old Adam Hall stands on the brink of a brilliant legal career. Now he is risking it all for a death-row killer and an impossible case.
Maximum Security Unit, Mississippi State Prison-Sam Cayhall is a former Klansman and unrepentant racist now facing the death penalty for a fatal bombing in 1967. He has run out of chances-except for one: the young, liberal Chicago lawyer who just happens to be his grandson. While the executioners prepare the gas chamber, while the protestors gather and the TV cameras wait, Adam has only days, hours, minutes to save his client. For between the two men is a chasm of shame, family lies, and secrets-including the one secret that could save Sam Cayhall's life. . . . or cost Adam his.
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Rating: **.3
Albeit not the pick I'd recommend to hardcore thriller fans, it's a change-up for Grisham that may breathe a little looseness into his long line of life-threatening plots. Read this one more for the plotting and wry humor than the action.
Rudy Baylor, a new law school graduate, once creamed of the good life as a corporate attorney. Now he faces joblessness and bankruptcy-unless he can win an insurance case against a heavyweight team of lawyers, a case that starts small but mushrooms into a frightening war of nerve and legal skill that could cost Rudy not only his future, but his life.
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Rating: **
My wife read this one, and based on her recommendation, I won't. I liked the movie, though, and I was surprised to hear the book was a put-downer.
A southern town is shocked when a 10-year-old black girl is raped by two white men. When the girl's father takes the law into his own hands (along with assault rifle), a young attorney friend named Jake Brigance volunteers to defend him. But Jake soon finds himself defending his own life in the process.
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