Grisham’s ‘The Reckoning’ explores the lonesome death of Dexter Bell

“The Reckoning” is a dark, depressing venture, coming on the heels of two uncharacteristically lighter novels by the venerable John Grisham. His premise is an inexplicable murder that takes place in Clanton, Miss., in 1946. Pete Banning, a World War II hero and wealthy gentleman farmer whose family has owned the land for generations, signs papers turning over the deed to his two nearly adult children. Three weeks later, he calmly walks into the Methodist church of which he is a member, and shoots his pastor and family friend, the Rev. Dexter Bell. Throughout the inquiry, trial and its consequences, Banning’s only statement about it is, “I have nothing to say.”

Author Grisham structures this tale as a triptych, each part an all but independent story of its own. The first two parts are slow moving, mostly predictable, gruesomely detailed and sometimes tedious in their historically accurate descriptions of horrifying acts and events. The third (and shortest) section shows Mr. Grisham at his best, a fast-moving denouement that contains the legal maneuverings, insights, trial particulars — and a close-to-the-end zinger twist — that we have come to expect over the course of his 32 novels to date.

There’s no mystery about who did the killing. We know almost everything from the first page. We don’t know why he did it, however, nor whether his close-knit Southern town will forgive him, nor whether the governor will grant him a lastminute reprieve. In addition to setting up the plot essential in the first section, Mr. Grisham creates the atmosphere of the time and milieu: assumption of privilege, the legalized cruelty of the treatment of blacks by whites, but also the inherent cruelty among the socially striving whites in a small Southern town.

He introduces the important surrounding characters: Banning’s wife Liza and their two children, Joel and Stella, his eccentric sister Florry, the family lawyers, and not least, the family’s black servants. Liza, for reasons not explained to the reader, has

that brought him to the Philippines during the siege of Bataan. What follows is a drawn-out, horrific, no-minutiae-omitted odyssey of Banning’s experience as a prisoner of the Japanese, from his capture in Bataan to the death marches, life as a prisoner of the Japanese in the hellish O’Donnell POW camp, and an eventual escape that feels a bit contrived, but allows the author to get on with the story.

Communication during this ordeal was out of the question, and Banning — missing in action — had been assumed dead. Army officials had come to the Banning home to announce this, and Liza assumed her new life as a widow with young children. His return, alive although wounded, comes to the family as much as a shock as did the announcement of his death.

Part three brings us back to the present — after the murder, that is — when young Joel Banning, now a fledgling lawyer, becomes the protagonist. Joel must confront the traumas while trying to uncover his father’s motive for the crime. He must also defend the family against a wrongful death suit by the minister’s widow. This section is in fact the most compelling part of the book, and it is, unfortunately brief and disappointing. The author seems to be more engaged in “The Reckoning” with the grisly aspects of war and punishment than with his signature depictions of upper class legal horrors. The solution to the mystery (of Banning’s motive for the murder) and the tying up of all the loose ends is less convincing and real than Mr. Grisham’s depiction of the tragic events that preceded.