The Last Juror by John Grisham
This is the latest product of the John Grisham literary empire. You can go ahead and make all the jokes you want about the lawyer reading the legal thriller, but I've always enjoyed Grisham's work, even back in high school when I wasn't even thinking about a legal career.
In this novel, we find the somewhat improbable story, which begins in 1970, of J. William Traynor, a twenty-three-year-old slacker from a rich Memphis family who drops out of Syracuse's journalism program after his wealthy grandmother cuts him off after five years with no degree. Traynor joins the staff of the near-bankrupt weekly paper, the Ford County Times, in Ford County, Mississippi, and is promptly christened "Willie" by his boss, the paper's editor, who co-owns the paper with his elderly sister. When the struggling paper is forced into involuntary bankruptcy by its creditor's, "Willie" borrows $50,000 from his grandmother, and buys it. At the ripe old age of twenty-three, Willie manages to take over the failed newspaper and increase its readership and revenue considerably.
Next comes the rape and murder of a young widow, with the prime suspect being Danny Padgitt, a twenty-four-year-old member of the Padgitt family, a mysterious and dangerous clan of bootleggers who has a stranglehold on the county and the sheriff in its pockets. Willie's new paper thrives on the sensational journalism that the crime inspires.
The Padgitt's iron-fisted power isn't enough to scare the jury out of convicting Danny, who, despite a life sentence, gets paroled after serving less than ten years. Then the jurors start turning up dead.
While this certainly isn't high-minded, intellectual literature, it does make for a good read so far, and I'm looking forward to finishing soon.
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