Catching up on Grisham Books (1)
MUST READ: GRAY MOUNTAIN
It has been a while since I last read Grisham. I’m catching up, because loyalty. (As usual, this may contain spoilers.)
The Racketeer (2012)
It’s a story about a Black attorney Malcolm Bannister from a small town in Virginia who was set up and convicted for racketeering. He's sentenced to 10 years and pretty much loses everything in his life: career, marriage, contact with his young son, and people who care – except for his aging father, who visits him once a month in prison.
Halfway doing time, a federal judge and his mistress are brutally murdered. Malcolm makes a deal with the FBI, giving them the name of the murderer in exchange for his release and a witness protection programme. He demands for a face-changing surgery under the programme, then disappears.
Halfway reading it, you can already sense where the story is going – of the long plot he’s planned with his best friend and girlfriend – which you’ll read with an urgent need to warn him with “One missing puzzle, Bannister, and you’re f*cked.”
Gray Mountain (2014)
Samantha Kofer is a lawyer in a NYC law firm who is being furloughed in the middle of economic meltdown and has no choice but to take up an internship at a legal aid clinic in the small coal-mining town of Brady, Virginia. The firm is headed by a woman named Mattie Wyatt and employs two others. I imagine the Appalachians as the setting is breathtakingly beautiful if you are just visiting to enjoy the view and you have zero life problems. But as far as this story goes, this is a bleak life in a small town in the middle of nowhere mountains.
In Brady, Samantha meets Donovan Gray, Mattie’s nephew – and later his brother, Jeff – who has a small law practice and is currently battling against the strip-mining companies in the town. Coal mining is a dangerous work, and so is the work of investigating and suing the companies, she learns.
This is a page-turner and suspenseful, or if you're a nervous reader like I am, it would require pauses mid-paragraphs.
Rogue Lawyer (2015)
The story is about a street lawyer Sebastian Rudd and his work. By the time I’m writing this, I’ve actually forgotten most of it.
Outside work, Sebastian’s a single parent who only gets to see his son a few days in a month, and his interest, among others, is funding cage fighters. His legal clients are people other lawyers won’t exactly fight over: the vicious, the misfits, the cop shooters – so kudos to him for doing works that others avoid. But Grisham doesn’t usually write characters that you want to root for, and this is one of the worst of them. There are some tough plotlines to read, but overall it’s a pretty uneventful story – for a crime world standard – except maybe for one time when one of his clients escapes from prison right in front of his eyes.
Read this at your own risk.
Images: jgrisham.com
It has been a while since I last read Grisham. I’m catching up, because loyalty. (As usual, this may contain spoilers.)
The Racketeer (2012)
It’s a story about a Black attorney Malcolm Bannister from a small town in Virginia who was set up and convicted for racketeering. He's sentenced to 10 years and pretty much loses everything in his life: career, marriage, contact with his young son, and people who care – except for his aging father, who visits him once a month in prison.
Halfway doing time, a federal judge and his mistress are brutally murdered. Malcolm makes a deal with the FBI, giving them the name of the murderer in exchange for his release and a witness protection programme. He demands for a face-changing surgery under the programme, then disappears.
Halfway reading it, you can already sense where the story is going – of the long plot he’s planned with his best friend and girlfriend – which you’ll read with an urgent need to warn him with “One missing puzzle, Bannister, and you’re f*cked.”
Gray Mountain (2014)
Samantha Kofer is a lawyer in a NYC law firm who is being furloughed in the middle of economic meltdown and has no choice but to take up an internship at a legal aid clinic in the small coal-mining town of Brady, Virginia. The firm is headed by a woman named Mattie Wyatt and employs two others. I imagine the Appalachians as the setting is breathtakingly beautiful if you are just visiting to enjoy the view and you have zero life problems. But as far as this story goes, this is a bleak life in a small town in the middle of nowhere mountains.
In Brady, Samantha meets Donovan Gray, Mattie’s nephew – and later his brother, Jeff – who has a small law practice and is currently battling against the strip-mining companies in the town. Coal mining is a dangerous work, and so is the work of investigating and suing the companies, she learns.
This is a page-turner and suspenseful, or if you're a nervous reader like I am, it would require pauses mid-paragraphs.
Rogue Lawyer (2015)
The story is about a street lawyer Sebastian Rudd and his work. By the time I’m writing this, I’ve actually forgotten most of it.
Outside work, Sebastian’s a single parent who only gets to see his son a few days in a month, and his interest, among others, is funding cage fighters. His legal clients are people other lawyers won’t exactly fight over: the vicious, the misfits, the cop shooters – so kudos to him for doing works that others avoid. But Grisham doesn’t usually write characters that you want to root for, and this is one of the worst of them. There are some tough plotlines to read, but overall it’s a pretty uneventful story – for a crime world standard – except maybe for one time when one of his clients escapes from prison right in front of his eyes.
Read this at your own risk.
Images: jgrisham.com
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