The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Grisham thrills again with ‘The Guardians’
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 nonstop since “A Time to Kill” was published in 1989.
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 (in 2017 he published two) without a notable diminishment of ingenuity or literary quality.
Which brings us to “The Guardians,” Grisham’s latest terrific novel. Grisham’s main character here is a so-called “innocence lawyer,” a workaholic attorneyand-Episcopal-priest named Cullen Post. Post has trimmed his life down to the barest of essentials, living in spartan quarters above the nonprofit Guardian Ministries, his workplace in Savannah. 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.
“The Guardians” is nuanced in its moral vision: Post acknowledges that most of the prisoners who contact him alleging wrongful convictions are, in fact, guilty; but it’s the thousands of others who have become his vocation. “It’s fairly easy to convict an innocent man and virtually impossible to exonerate one,” Post reminds a potential client. So far, the team has exonerated eight prisoners.
Quincy Miller may just become the ninth. His fate will depend on a relentless re-investigation conducted by Post and his colleagues and some strong-arming of jailhouse snitches and other witnesses who gave false testimony years ago.
In his titanic efforts to turn justice denied for Miller into justice delayed, Post courts danger both human and supernatural. 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.