A Time For Mercy - John Grisham

Published by Hodder & Stoughton: London, 2020.

This novel, like the vast majority of works by John Grisham, follows a lawyer as he attempts to win a difficult case. In this instance the lawyer is Jake Brigance, who also starred in Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, published back in 1989. Although this novel is written over 30 years after that one (it is also apparently the third novel to star Brigance) it is set in 1990. Grisham's novel's are always able to be read as stand-alones, and in fact I didn't even realise this was a sequel into quite a long way into the book. I imagine that if you had read A Time to Kill and the first sequel Sycamore Row you would have a better connection with Brigance and his family, but Time for Mercy does a good job of setting up who these characters are and why we should care about them anyway.

In this novel Brigance faces two cases, although one of them is far more important to the plot: sixteen year old Drew Gamble has shot and killed his mother's abusive boyfriend after his mother was beaten so badly that Drew and his sister believed she was dead. The case is made more difficult by the fact that the deceased, Stuart Kofer, was a police office with a great public persona and a very protective family. Now the state seeks the death penalty for Gamble, arguing that the crime was in cold blood because Kofer was already passed out from drinking when the crime took place.

Grisham is one of the best-selling living authors in the world currently, and this is because he knows how to write a story that draws the reader in. We sympathise with Drew and his family, we are shocked by every revelation that we learn about Kofer's villainy, and we have no idea how on earth the book will resolve, considering that the case will go to trial, and despite our sympathies it seems a fairly clear-cut case! In the midst of all this, Grisham subtly presents different points of view, including Christian ones, to provoke discussion amongst the readers. Grisham is apparently a Christian himself, but doesn't shy away from making even Christian characters complex, even wrong at times. 

Grisham is a reader I turn to in order to get fully lost in an easy-to-read book. The crimes are gritty but the journey to find justice for those who need it is always the focus. As with all Grisham's book, I recommend.

Completed 18 April 2023.

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