John Grisham’s “The Last Juror” (Doubleday, 355 pages, $27.95) isn’t a lickety-split legal thriller. Instead, it harks back to Grisham’s very first book, “A Time to Kill,” which came out from a small publisher in 1989, two years before “The Firm” vaulted him to fame. Grisham always has claimed that first effort is one of his favorites, and many readers feel the same way. Those folks are going to love “The Last Juror.” The new novel also is set in the small Mississippi town of Clanton and revisits similar issues of class, race and crime.
It’s an absorbing if unevenly paced tale, divided into three parts and spanning the decade between 1970 and 1980, when narrator Willie Traynor owns The Ford County Times.
A Memphis native who studied journalism, the 23-year-old Traynor buys the bankrupt weekly with a borrowed $50,000 from his grandmother. Traynor expects to boost circulation and revenues so the paper will be profitable in a year. A sensational murder and ensuing trial accelerate his expectations.
Traynor recounts how he covered for the paper the rape and killing of a young widow with two preschoolers in the house and how it was clear from the get-go that Danny Padgitt committed the crime.
Even Traynor is a bit surprised that the publicity surrounding the Padgitt case doesn’t have the defense seriously calling for a change of venue. But lawyer Lucien Wilbanks wants the trial in Ford County, where the notorious Padgitt clan, whose legitimate timber business acts as a cover for their moonshine and marijuana operations, owns the sheriff.
As Baggy, a drunken reporting veteran, tells his young boss: “The boy’s guilty; his only chance is to have a jury that can be bought or scared.”
As it turns out, the 12 men and women — including Calia Ruffin, the first black woman juror in Ford County history — aren’t intimidated enough to acquit Padgitt. But do his threats to exact vengeance make them think twice during the penalty phase? Padgitt escapes the gas chamber. What the jury doesn’t know is that a life sentence doesn’t always mean life. Danny Padgitt will be paroled nine years later.
Grisham slows the pace of the book after its opening chapters. You almost can see him tipping back his chair and propping his feet on the porch railing as he spins out stories within stories — of how Traynor becomes friends with Ruffin and her lost-sheep son, Sam; of how the young reporter/editor/publisher learns politics and poker; of how his coverage of the Padgitt case colors his life, especially when his testimony denies the convict parole the first time around.
But the day does come when Padgitt is back in Ford County. And then there’s the day one of the jurors is killed. And then another. . . .
It’s not the most original of plots, nor does a requisite twist make it any fresher. But the book’s sense of time and place, and Grisham’s obvious affection for both, help make up for the lack of suspense.
