Grisham’s latest fresh as ever
The Guardians John Grisham Doubleday
What is there left to say about a new John Grisham novel?
Maybe only that Grisham has done it again.
The Guardians is Grisham’s 40th novel; he’s now 64 and has been writing suspense novels pretty much non-stop since A Time to Kill was published in 1989. Most of his novels are legal thrillers, but Grisham has also written stories about rare books, sports and medicine.
Such creative longevity is not that unusual in the suspense genre, but what is rare is Grisham’s feat of keeping up the pace of producing, on average, a novel a year without a notable diminishment of ingenuity or literary quality.
Which brings us to
The Guardians, Grisham’s latest novel. The main character here is a so-called “innocence lawyer,” a workaholic attorney-and-episcopal-priest named Cullen Post. Post has trimmed his life down to the barest of essentials, living in spartan quarters above the non-profit Guardian Ministries, his workplace in Savannah, Ga. The book focuses on Post’s investigation into the wrongful conviction of a black man named Quincy Miller who was set up to take the fall for the murder of a white lawyer in a small Florida town some 22 years before the opening of this story.
Post’s efforts to ferret out exculpatory evidence in this cold case put him in grave danger because, for one thing, the shadowy drug cartel responsible for the murder has been known to hold grisly parties in isolated jungle locales south of the border. In the dead centre of this novel, Post hears a cautionary tale from a traumatized survivor of one of these gatherings.
In an affecting backstory, Post recalls his early career as a public defender; but the grotesque contradictions of that job brought on a nervous breakdown. After a “come-to-jesus” moment during his recovery, Post was ordained and began serving with a prison ministry, which led him to innocence work and eventually Guardian Ministries.
Post is a driven and likable loner whom, I hope, Grisham will bring back in future novels. After all, as The Guardians makes clear, there’s plenty of work left for an innocence lawyer to do.