Grisham, John. The Judge’s List. Doubleday, 2021.
Ahhhh, John Grisham. Do you know someone who hasn’t read one of his legal thrillers? Probably not. I’d like to find one of the 5,000 people who read his first book A Time to Kill before he became famous for his second book, The Firm. What a story! He is such an inspiration to all of us wanna be writers who have day jobs. His bio states that he took 3 years to write his first book and woke up every day at 5 a.m. to work on it.
What is it about John Grisham?
I don’t know much about the law, so he could be fudging all of his legal information, but somehow, I doubt it. He has a law degree and practiced criminal defense and personal injury law before being elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives. His short stint as a lawyer has served him well. His bio claims that since his first book was published he has written “at least one novel a year.” Wow.
That makes him a very prolific writer. I am not sure that I have read all of his work, but I did give it the old college try during the Covid-19 lockdown. While all of his novels have a legal theme in them, they don’t seem at all formulaic to me.
I love his characters!
In The Judges’ List, he brings back Lacy Stoltz who was featured in The Whistler, 2016. Lacy is still single and nearing 40. As the story opens, she is recovering from the injuries sustained at the end of the The Whistler and still in the same dead-end job, still dating the same FBI agent and wondering about her future with him and in the (fictitious) Board on Judicial Conduct.
She is assisted around the office by a new hire named Darren Trope who is smitten with Lacy. Sadelle, the ancient paralegal who keeps the office working while struggling with the last stages of lung disease, is her office confidante who can be trusted to keep a secret. Jeri Crosby is the informant who long ago cracked the case of her father’s murderer but needs Lacy and the BJC to help her find evidence to convict him.
And then there is the judge who is a serial killer, Ross Bannick. Yikes. If ANY of his spying capabilities are actually possible, the world is a very scary place. This guy is Sinister. He has money stashed all over the place under different names, has a secret hideaway “office” where he does all of his espionage on all of his victims and potential victims. He surveilles the police, FBI, hotels, car rental places and more. He has thought of every thing. To be honest, I didn’t love that character.
Location, location, location
It probably wouldn’t matter much to me, but since my family has suddenly gotten interested in the state of Florida, watching the characters zip all over the state and into Alabama and Louisiana was interesting. I was intrigued by the amount of driving the characters did. I’ve driven to Florida a time or two and know that driving from the panhandle to the keys is exhausting to say the least. In The Judge’s List, Just about every day, someone was driving up and down the state or out of state to meet a detective or the family of a victim. It makes me feel kind of lazy for not zipping up to Chicago, Muncie, or West Lafayette more often. Maybe that is the difference between pushing 40 and being over 60?
His humanity always leaks in to his work
In addition to the characters he creates, I am always impressed by Grisham’s own character. It seems obvious to me as a reader that he is empathetic to the victims in his stories. At the end of the novel, Lacy spends time talking with one of the victim’s family and tells them what she has learned. Throughout the novel, Lacy is worn out by Jeri’s story, but she always listens and she always responds.
If you want to see what I mean, read The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town , 2006. I read it during the Covid-19 lockdown and found it gripping. It is refreshing that Grisham is always exposing the seedy side of the law. The Innocent Man is a non fiction account of how one man was framed for murder and was given the death penalty. As a pro-lifer, I have always been against the death penalty, but if you are for the death penalty, or on the fence about it, I bet The Innocent Man will make you think twice.
Will this book change me?
I’m not gonna lie, I know I will give some serious thought to my online presence. Do you think that it is really possible for someone to use the Internet to spy on us as easily as Ross Bannick does in this novel? I seriously hope not. Seriously. I hope not. Also, I’m going to see if I can figure out which of Grisham’s books I have read and see about reading the rest. I was reading them every year as he released them until I started Playing for Pizza. I couldn’t finish it. I might pick it up again and remind myself why I didn’t like it. Probably because it was not a typical Grisham legal thriller. I found it kind of dull.
But this one, I really enjoyed. I hope he writes more with this protagonist. Lacy is a very real character who gets to live in the sunny state of Florida, I’d like to read more about her.