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Summary: Those were the days
Review: Kind of reminds me of a good ol' boy talking about the ol' days and oh, by the way, let's throw about 4 pages of story into all the reminiscing.
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Summary: Grisham's Still Water Runs Deep
Review: "The Last Juror" is neither "The Firm" nor "the Pelican Brief", nor is it similar to "A Time for Killing" which shares "Juror's" Ford County, Mississippi, setting. But it is a powerful novel in its own right, combining the elements of classic Grisham courtroom drama with a nostalgic study of life in rural Mississippi. The main story is of the brutal rape and murder of a young widow. The alleged murderer, Danny Padgitt, is the youngest son of the wealthy but reclusive local gentry. Protagonist Willie Traynor, Memphis-born and Syracuse-educated, migrates to Clanton and, with the help of a rich aunt, buys the dying local newspaper. So while the story is ostensibly one of the crime and subsequent retribution, it is also a poignant tale of the decade-long relationship that develops between Traynor and "Miss" Callie Ruffin, matriarch of a poor but proud black family of Clanton. Just as the Big Brown River and its creeks and sloughs wind through the meadows of Ford County, Grisham's prose meanders through sub-plots, anecdotes and banalities of the small-town south. Grisham is in no hurry to get to the climax - indeed the recipe for Miss Callie's pot roast is hardly a page-turner. But the pace of the prose is a conscious and necessary element of the author's message, and seemingly unconnected events eventually tie together to complete the portrait of Grisham's South. And if the weighty topics of civil rights and Viet Nam are axes Grisham chooses to grind, he treats them with sensitivity and respect, and is neither heavy-handed nor judgmental in his delivery. The reader looking for a thriller along the lines of Grisham's fine earlier works may be disappointed, but it would be vastly unfair to dismiss this novel. "The Last Juror" is thoughtful and thought provoking literature; an example of a fine American story teller broadening his scope and delving deeper into familiar topics.
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Summary: Out of Ideas
Review: This is by far the worst Grisham yet. Too many Good Ole Boys, Bubbas and babbling. Absolutely no suspense, drama or reason to continue reading. Fall asleep on the front porch of an historic falling-down old home in a boring small town with this one. Let's hope Grisham hangs up his lucrative contractual hat with this bomb. Pass this up for almost any David Baldacci or Dan Brown read you can get your hands on.
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Summary: Nolo Contendere
Review: The Last Juror is not John Grisham's finest work. Missing are the compelling contemporary issues, high throttled suspense, and all around passions that pervade early novels such as A Time to Kill, The Chamber, The Firm, or even The Runaway Jury. The Last Juror is at least 100 pages too long for its plotline, and its ending is evident long before the final pages. The book starts fast: the story of a grisly rape and murder, and subsequent trial make for some page-turning. A jury is presented with the classic question: life in prison or the death sentence? Hardly suspenseful, for the deliberations (not at all sketched by Grisham) come only halfway through the novel, and the book jacket has all but given the ensuing plot away anyway. So the reader trudges through the next decade of the novel's storyline, year by boring year. Ostensibly, the narrator, owner of the local newspaper in the small Mississippi town (same setting as A Time to Kill) must fill us in on every detail of life that happens between this first trial and the ultimate (hey, no surprise here at all...) parole of the threatening killer. Every column, obituary, advertisement ever published by narrator's paper, The Ford County Times, is chronicled. Grisham drags us through the young man's haberdashery conversion, his social life (quite dull), his religious research (gee, there are a lot of enthusiastic Christian churches in the Bible Belt, no kidding?), and his eating and sleeping habits. By the time the protagonist has built up his business, we feel we, too, have earned shares in the venture. We don't really delve back into any real action until the final sixty pages of the book. OK, again no surprises (it's on the book jacket): someone is killing the jurors who originally convicted our parolee. Even then, there is little suspense. We have the list of jurors, we are waiting for the killings and final resolution. Grisham could have done much better with the topic of parole injustice, and he certainly missed the boat on this one. This book should have been released during the Willie Horton days of Dukakis v. Bush. It might have held more interest.
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Summary: Grisham needs a pseudonym
Review: After reading a number of other booklovers' reviews, I get the distinct impression that Grisham had durn well better write a thriller, or his biggest fans will be disappointed. Not me. I think the non-thriller-lawyer books he writes are better than the others. There's just so many times you can bring out that tired old attorney-in-trouble recipe and make it work (see Clancy, King, Cornwell, etc., for examples of going to the well once too often). If his books such as "Skipping Christmas," "Bleachers," and "A Painted House" had been released under another name, it would have kept his diehard fans happy.
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Summary: Boring, boring, boring
Review: Grisham has definitely lost his edge! Where is the suspense? Where are the page turners we so eagerly awaited since "The King of Torts"? We're sick of reading about racism in the South in the 1970's, we want a book that's a gripping read like his earlier books. Quite a disappointment.
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Summary: Get an Autographed copy of a great book!
Review: You can bid on an autographed copy of John Grisham's "The Last Juror!" Read more at CMTAuctions.com!
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Summary: The Last Juror, Has Grisham Lost His Edge?
Review: I did not mean to imply that this was a bad book. Far from it. It is entertaining in it's own homely way but It's certainly not the John Grisham I remember from the eighties, the Grisham that wrote the edge of your seat thrillers like The Firm and The Pelican Brief. "A jury sentenced Danny Padgitt to life in prison. He sentenced them to death!" Setting Welcome to Clanton, Ford County, Mississippi. Grisham returns the the setting for the first book he ever wrote, Time to Kill, for his latest release, The Last Juror. Meet Joyner William Traynor aka Willie Traynor. Willie, who is the narrator for this story, is a reporter for The Ford County Times, when the newspaper goes bankrupt. Having freshly graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Journalism, Willie is in a position, with the help of his wealthy Grandmother, BeeBee, to buy the newspaper and does. Plot Willie is barely settling in as the Owner/Publisher/Editor etc. of his weekly publication, when the circulation is given a boost because of a particularly gruesome and violent murder of a widow named Rhoda Kassellaw. Danny Padgitt, one of the sons of a notorious, semi-legitimate clan of moonshiners and timber millers, who inhabit a nearby island, is arrested for the crime, after crashing his truck, making a getaway. Sandwiched between the arrest and trial of Danny Padgitt, Willie decides to write a human interest story on a prominent local black family - the Ruffins. This remarkable family has eight children, seven of which have earned, not only college degrees but PHDs and are currently professors at various leading universities. Upon their initial meeting, Miss Callie, the Ruffin family matriarch, serves Willie a scrumptious luncheon and Willie and Callie hit it off wonderfully and become fast friends. Later Callie is the Last Juror chosen for the Padgitt murder trial and thereupon sets history as the first Negro juror in Mississippi history. The Trial All the evidence points to Danny's guilt and even though he threatened to get the twelve jurors, if they find him guilty, (including Willie's newfound friend Callie Ruffin), the jury still finds him guilty. Though the Juror's found Padgitt guilty of rape and murder, they cannot come to a consensus on the death penalty, so Padgitt is automatically sentenced to the alternative, Life in Prison, which at that time in Mississippi equated to ten years, less with good behavior, a fact that is withheld from juries. This angers the townfolk as they were sure that Padgitt would get the Gas Chamber. Everybody was mad but they didn't know who to be angry with, because the the jurors swore an oath to keep the vote a secret. From this point forward we digress into a fairly dull albeit interesting dissertation, with a couple exceptions, about Willie's interaction in the community and how he turns a marginally profitable newspaper into a successful one. The exceptions are where they try to sneak a parole hearing through for Padgitt and where Padgitt is observed in a work release program with little or no security. Our protagonist, Willie, shows up and rains on their (the Padgitt's) parade in both cases but the writing is on the wall. They are determined to get Danny Padgitt out and eventually they do. Conclusion I won't kid you about this book. I have very mixed feelings about what I read. On the one hand, it a warm friendly story about a fairly sleepy fictitious town and county in Mississippi, pretty much describing rural life in the South in the Seventies. And of course, Grisham has one of the best writing styles around. For this book he even added some southern homilies to make it feel more warm and fuzzy. Except for the Padgitts and their sleazy lawyer, Lucien Wilbanks, the characters are likable if not lovable. The warm, lovable Callie Ruffin kept reminding me of Oprah Winfrey, though I don't know why. Other interesting individuals were Baggy, the staff reporter, who is drunk after twelve noon, Harry Rex, a lawyer and carryover from A Time to Kill, and Wiley, the part time staff photographer. Once Danny Padgitt was sent off to prison, after a third of the book, with rare exceptions it was like reading Driving Miss Daisy. Grisham described how Willie had lunch every Thursday with Callie, and the techniques Willie used to build up the Paper and how he visited each of Ford Counties eighty some Churches for service, one per week and then finally, for about the last forty pages things got suspenseful again and does not end the way you are lead to believe. Again, I say this still held my interest, there was never a danger of my not finishing the book, it's just that I buy Grisham for excitement, for thrills. This was vintage Grisham, sans the thrills and intrigue. Unfortunately he's been doing that a lot lately.
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Summary: Very Slow Read... A far departure from his first books
Review: I used to be an avid John Grisham fan. I would anxiously wait for his books to come out and be one of the first to purchase a book. Lately, his books have strayed and have not caught my interest. This book sounded like it could be in line with his first books, so I was anxious to read it. I can usually finish a Grisham book in less than a day... this one dragged for about a week. I forced myself to finish it so I could start a new book. The main character is not very interesting and it makes it hard to feel any involvement in the choices he makes in his life. If John Grisham continue the same trend, I will have to find a new author to enjoy.
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Summary: Misleading title, excellent read
Review: This book is not primarily about the law, as the title would suggest. Rather it traces the story of a small town newspaper publisher in the deep south in the 1970's. It gracefully covers a variety of sujects including the influence of the church in small towns, race relations, the legal system, Vietnam, Southern food and drink. It repeats and, on occassion repudiates, various stereotypes--from crooked local sheriffs (true) to illiterate minorities (untrue). It is truly a pleasant read, and it fits together on a par with Grisham's best books. Highly recommended.
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