An Innocent Man
John Grisham
I have something of a love/hate relationship with John Grisham’s books. I loved The Firm and The Partner and The Testament. Real page turners, all. But I found The Client predictable and The Street Lawyer preachy and The Last Juror mostly just dull. A Time to Kill was in a category of its own, with both love and hate. I loved the first 95% of the book, but the ending was weak.
Which brings me to An Innocent Man, Grisham’s 20th book and the 12th of his that I’ve read (a fact I’m slightly embarrassed to admit publicly). This is the true story of Ron Williamson, an Oklahoma man who was convicted of raping and murdering a local teen in a galling travesty of justice. He was sentenced to die for these crimes that he did not commit. All of this information is available on the back cover of the book. It is also a summary of the book’s first 200 pages. And this is the problem with the book. Grisham wrote the first 200 pages as though the reader does not already know that Williamson would be convicted and sentenced to death. As if the reader would be in suspense. I found it excruciating! Probably the author was trying to establish in the readers’ minds just how terrible was the miscarriage of justice, but he could have done so in half the pages.
Then in the middle of the book there are a few pages of photographs of the people involved in the book. These photos are captioned, and some of them give away the answer to the pressing question of the second half of the book, whether Williamson would ever be released. Although it would seem that this should have made the second half of the book as bad as the first, that actually isn’t the case. While not exactly gripping, there are some fascinating subplots and human interest angles that make the second half a worthwhile read. The book finishes well.
So to whom would I recommend this book? Diehard Grisham fans – it is, after all, still John Grisham, even if it isn’t his best effort. Also, if you have a bleeding heart, An Innocent Man will warm its cockles. But I might also recommend it to staunch advocates of the death penalty. The way the Williamson case progressed was so perverse that a fiction work using the same facts would be implausible and probably never published. As the author no doubt intended, this book effectively raises the spectre of a ‘perfect storm’ of police corruption, prosecutorial zeal and judicial incompetence converging to deprive an innocent person of liberty and possibly life. That should be disturbing to anyone.
