Sycamore Row
by John Grisham
I
generally describe Grisham’s books as mind candy, easy reads without a lot of
substance or literary merit that are perfect for the beach or an airplane and
are eminently entertaining. While many
successful best selling authors that crank out a book a year tend to devolve
into formulaic predictable stories that have caused me to avoid more recent
publications [Patricia Cornwell and James Patterson come to mind], Grisham has
managed to maintain my interest by his creativity and delving into some new
aspect of the law with each new novel.
Sycamore Row returns us to the
cast of characters first introduced in Grisham’s freshman effort, A Time To Kill, which was
published in 1989. Three years after winning an acquittal for Charles Lee
Hailey, Jake Brigance is once again drawn into a legal morass of black vs.
white in the small southern town of Clanton, Mississippi. Seth Hubbard, who
composed a hand-written holographic will disinheriting his children and leaving
millions to his Black housekeeper the day before hanging himself from a
sycamore tree, has specifically requested that Brigance represent his estate
and ensure the terms of his will are carried out.
Naturally,
the disinherited heirs counting on the millions hire big city lawyers with
questionable ethics to prove the will is either a forgery or the result of
undue influence on the part of the beneficiary. With this much money at stake
the piranhas are creeping out of every corner. Jake is determined to fight for
his client – the estate.
Grisham
is at his best describing the machinations of the court system, the partiality
of judges, the biases of juries, and the lengths to which many lawyers will go
for money and to win at all costs. At its very basic, litigation is a game with
winners and losers and playing by the rules is not always rewarded.
Sycamore Row is Grisham at his
best. This book was much better than I
had anticipated after his having spent nearly 15 years at the top of the best
sellers lists.
No comments:
Post a Comment