In publishing order, this is Grisham's seventh novel and it's told almost entirely during a court case involving the widow of a man who died from lung cancer as a result of smoking versus big tobacco. The jury of twelve plus alternates are the main players, with the opposing attorneys and judge having lesser word and page time. There are various factions on both the plaintiff and defense sides trying to illegally subvert and control the jury's verdict through several--at first shadowy, but later much more defined--characters. One of the jurors is a ringer who is working with a clever woman on the outside.

After the halfway point, a couple characters began to emerge. I won't spoil who it is, but this is when the story turned from a two-star "It's OK" read to something more engaging. The pages started to flow, never fast enough for a thriller, but there began to be some twists and turns to the plot and a surprising ending that I didn't see coming. I might have seen the ending had I been able to get into the first half of the story more. The second half redeems the overall experience somewhat, raising the rating to 3.25 stars. I put this second to the bottom in my least favorite Grisham books read to date in publishing order. I do appreciate this being a departure from the other six books in that its focus was less on the lawyers and their clients and more about the jurors. The biggest problem, I think, was that there was too much exposition-riddled focus on the jurors collectively, rather than zooming in on a couple key jurors. I understand after reading the whole book why the author did this, but along the way it created a less immersive reading experience.

I've remarked in other Grisham reviews that I expect at some type of courtroom drama, but this story seemed to be ruined by too much, a lot of which bears the author's achille's heel: extraneous exposition. Pages and pages and chapters and chapters telling the reader this and that happened in the trial and thoughts about how the jury might have interpreted various courtroom happenings. And then there's the jury's almost neverending, tiresome demands on the judge (I felt sorry for the judge at one point when they were complaining about how many conjugal visits they should have).

Until the halfway point, it's a fairly monotonous read. I just couldn't wrap my brain around who I was supposed to root for. Certainly it wasn't big tobacco and their war chest, was it? But then the plaintiff died from abusing cigarettes, why should his widow receive some ridiculous settlement? Probably the most likable juror was the blind foreman and there wasn't much about him other than he stayed in his room most of the time. It was mostly the out of court moments that the author seems to show, versus the potentially more riveting during court scenes (which, again, were laced with tons of exposition).

Too much exposition, too many characters with not enough focus until after the half-way point in the story.

6,767 Kindle locations. Approximately 498 pages.

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Created Aug 22, 2013 at 2:07pm • Submit your own review...