I have polished several John Grisham novels (mostly when I should have been doing something useful like working on the house or yard, but what the heck, life’s too short). I suppose we have a tendency to denigrate his books; too popular with the masses, but he really does know how to write a good plot that keeps the pages turning. He also must really hate lawyers, because in each of these novels the way the lawyers operate would make a barracuda blush with shame. In addition to turning out god stories, when I look at his most recent work, he is clearly emphasizing community values in the South during the fifties and sixties as well as the dynamics families under pressure of those relationships between blacks and whites.The Chamber is a good example. If anyone deserves to die it’s Sam Cayhall. He’s on death row in a Mississippi prison following the delayed conviction for the deaths of two children at the 1967 bombing of a Jewish lawyer’s office. The children were not supposed to be there when the bomb went off, but because the timing mechanism on the bomb had been misset. Iut took three trials to convict him, and he’s now a seventy-year-old frail old man, but still unrepentent. Adam Hall, his grandson, whose parents had changed their name in a rejection of their parent’s values and moved away. Adam had attended law school where he became obsessed with his grandfather’s case and the death penalty. He joins the law firm that had been working on Sam’s case and persuades them to send him down to fight the death penalty with only thirty days left before he goes to the gas chamber. Adam learns about the destructive relationship of his father, the intense and unrepentant racism of his grandfather, and the hugely destructive impact all of this had on the family. It’s a race against time as he discovers a sub-plot that could exonerate his grandfather. Grisham is clearly against the death penalty and the details he provides are gruesome in the extreme. A very interesting page-turner, very different from his earlier work.
