"The Widow", by John Grisham

John Grisham has written many best-selling legal thrillers since his first book was published in 1989, but this is his first attempt at a a mystery. His protagonist is a small-town lawyer who finally gets a client who (he thinks) is rich, and the guy gets accused of murdering her to get his hands on her money. When he gets convicted on circumstantial evidence, his mission becomes one of discovering who the real killer is.

Murder mysteries work best when the reader is presented with a cast of characters, and then has to guess which one is the killer. That is not the case here, unfortunately. The real killer is not introduced until near the end, in a way that strikes the reader as too abrupt, and we feel blind-sided as a result. Grisham clearly is out of his element here.

Grisham does a good job of presenting the trials and tribulations of a small-town lawyer. This is based on his personal experience, as he discussed in an October interview with C-SPAN's David Rubenstein. Grisham described getting word from his agent that his first book had been optioned for a movie, for more money than he had made in his ten years of practicing law. When Rubenstein asked him how long after that he abandoned his law pratice, Gisham replied, "Oh, about fifteen minutes. I left the office, and didn't even bother turning out the lights. To Rubenstein's question of "What about your clients?", Grisham replied, "Most of them were not paying me anyway, and the others could easily find anothr lawyer."

Grisham deserves credit for dispelling the common notion that a law degree is a ticket to easy steet. But then he turns around and exacerbates the problem by using some ridiculous amounts for lawyer hourly rates. The idea that a general practice lawyer in a small town could charge and collect $250 an hour is ludicrous. And then the lawyer drafts a will providing for a trust in which he will be getting $500 an hour as executor of the will and as trustee of the trust. And then at his trial, amounts of $1,000 and $1,500 an hour are quoted for high-end tax lawyers. Sheer lunacy. The proscutor got it right when, in closing arugment, she turned to the defendant and said "Nobody is worth $500 an hour". I would add that anybody who pays this kind of money to a lawyer is a fool.

Grisham mires us in unnecessaty detail. For example, he describes in detail every one of the dozen lunches which the lawyer treats his client to. The result is a book of 404 pages which should have been much shorter.

I liked that Grisham told the story in chronological order. I mention this because the book I read immediately before this one, "The Viper", by Brad Meltzer, was a hopeless mess, jumping around between different time periods and locations so fast my head was swimming.