A TIME TO KILL by John Grisham ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Every now and then, it’s nice returning to a reliable author like John Grisham. Doing it too often can make their skills seem trite. But spaced out enough, it’s like putting on Reading Autopilot, letting yourself get swept away by an expert of their craft. So here I am again, jumping into the world of court hearings and law.

The problematic language aside, what a swing for Grisham’s first novel. It’s jargon-heavy, violent, layered, potentially controversial, and LONG. I can tell he put everything he’d learned and felt during his early law career into the story. Books with authenticity like this are all the more immersive and enthralling. I was there in the humid Mississippi of the eighties, a place as backward and scary as I imagined it would be.

The content of the story had me wondering if this could be written today. The textbook rules of justice aside, would a moral dilemma like this (a father killing his ten year old daughter’s rapists) even matter today? Would we entertain Carl Lee’s “innocence” in a world of righteous social media do-gooders and cannabilistic political finger-wagging. I feel like the art of analyzing right and wrong has been lost from the past, when more than just the black and white of a crime or policy or system was taken into account and common sense still had legs. I don’t know if the premise of the book was far-fetched when it was published, but I worry the core argument here would be laughed away today.

After finishing this, I felt the same relief I think I would if I really lived through weeks and weeks of a case like this. Every little stitch, every step of the judicial process was touched on. It’s told like only a real lawyer can tell it. If I learned anything, it’s that we have a wild, complicated justice system, and the ones tasked to work inside of it are fully aware of its flaws (and how to exploit them).

This refreshed my interest in Grisham’s work and pulpy eighties bestsellers. I guess there’s a reason there’s so many of these on the shelf.