Grisham, John

• A Time to Kill (7 r)

  • This courtroom/civil rights drama came out a while before Grisham hit it big with "The Firm". This is actually the best of his works, but only by a little bit. It's about a colored man who murders the rapists/murderers of his daughter after a white jury goes easy on them. Some good legal drama, if a bit melodramatic.

• The Firm (7 r)

  • The book that inspired the (pretty good) Tom Cruise movie about a young lawyer who goes to work for a prestigious "old style" law firm, only to find out the firm is involved with some very nasty people with guns and a bad attitude. Very intricate, well-structured plot, and I loved Gene Hackman in the movie...perfect for that part.

• The Pelican Brief (7 r)

  • The book that inspired the (pretty awful) movie about a young law student who guesses correctly about a theory behind the murderers of two Supreme Court justices. Avoid the movie, but do read the book...it is quite good.

• The Client (5)

  • A big step down in quality from the first three. Only read this if you just can't put anything by Grisham aside. This plot of a young boy who learns some critical information and then is forced into hiding to protect himself, with only a tough female lawyer (Susan Sarandon in the movie) to sympathize with and protect him.

• The Rainmaker (7)

  • This book pits the usual Grisham just-out-of-law-school scrappy young lawyer against unexpectedly large and wealthy clients, this time in the form of a big insurance company that writes policies but denies virtually all claims, taking advantage of people too poor and uneducated to read the policy and/or afford to file a lawsuit in protest. While the young lawyer, Rudy Baylor, is busy putting together a damning case, with parallels to the famous non-fiction legal thriller by Jonathan Harr, "A Civil Action", there are the obligatory subplots involving a beautiful domestic abuse victim and a miserly old woman with greedy relatives waiting to pounce on a suspected fortune in her will.

    I liked this just as much as any of Grisham's books, probably his best work since "The Firm", to be honest. I find that I can tear through these books very quickly. They are written to be devoured in big easy-to-read chunks. I particularly enjoy class-action lawsuit that get at the heart of corporate corruption and dishonesty, and unlike Harr's book, this one (being fiction) has an unambiguously happy ending. A great airplane read.

• The Street Lawyer (7)

  • Grisham turns out another in his long line of consistently good books about outmatched lawyers somehow winning through in the end. This time, the main character is Michael Brock, a rising star in a major law firm. Faced with a tragic act of terrorism, Brock starts doing some Serious Thinking and decides to not only start working for the public good but also to expose corruption in his old firm that has devastated the lives of many already in poverty.

    Brock's partners turn on him, but Brock is already too far gone into urban D. C., where he learns to appreciate small comforts and starts looking into the legal problems of the homeless with the help of his new law partners, street-smart advocates who show him the ropes. Good mind candy.

• The Runaway Jury (7)

  • For once, a Grisham novel that doesn't have a lawyer as its central focus (sort of). In this one, the main characters are the lawyers for the tobacco companies, who are ruthlessly defending against a civil lawsuit by trying to manipulate the jury, and a small group of do-gooders, one of whom has managed to get himself selected for the jury, with plans to stick it to the tobacco companies with a multi-million dollar verdict.

    As usual, Grisham does a good job describing the "inside baseball" of lawsuits in which big companies with lots of financial resources work to tilt to judicial playing field in their direction. The personal confrontations, stings and double-crosses are entertaining as always, making this one another great page-turner that is very hard to put down (but you always feel just a little guilty afterwards).

Return to the Welcome Page of Doug's Library.