I love Jake! He’s a good father, a loving husband and a cracking lawyer, so it was good to be reunited with him! Jake was the star of A Time To Kill when he defended Carl Lee and also takes on the Hubbard case in Sycamore Row. Jake Brigance has been given little choice about being Drew’s lawyer and watches the town turn against him… again, because as a Grisham fan, I know Jake. But the more time Drew spends locked in jail, the more the cops realise he’s just a small, underdeveloped sixteen year old boy. With Stuart being a cop, the whole of Clanton are rallying behind the police to see justice served. In A Time For Mercy, Drew has shot his mother’s boyfriend, there’s no doubt about who killed Stuart but does Drew deserve to be sent to the gas chamber?

Grisham has produced another thriller that has an unbelievably smart plot but also pushes you to think more than any other thriller writer, and not in a “can you guess the twist” way, but in a way that makes you consider what is morally right and what does your gut think. Grisham shows that he not only disagrees but he understands and is a part of that fabric, which reeled me in and helped me feel comfortable in the world that he portrayed.He’s done it again. In modern times, the South is misunderstood as a backwards land, completely separate from the moral fabric of modern society. I love the sensitivity and reality that Grisham paints the South with.

Additionally, the Smallwood subplot did not feel fully resolved at the time of the book’s completion. This was a disappointment, yet, a validation of reality. Something must be paid for, as the society would not let things go otherwise. After all of the build up, I knew he couldn’t let the boy go free. The core moral quandary of this book would absolutely cleave a town’s morality in two. Growing up in Texas and in the Christian Bible Belt community, Grisham portrary, with sensitivity and accuracy, the attitudes that you’d find. In the case of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, him graphically killing off the main party’s small animal companion caused me to put down the book entirely. Uniquely, I like suspenseful plots, but too much suspense or grit can cause me to put a book down.

This novel, as with the first, catered to my taste for drama. This is the second novel I’ve read by him, the first being A Time to Kill. I’ve just finished A Time for Mercy by John Grisham.

A time for mercy john grisham review