Category: human rights

Went directly to #1 on The New York Times Bestseller List.

I recommend it.

“The Guardians” is Grisham’s 40th novel; he’s now 64 …

Such creative longevity is not that unusual in the suspense genre, but what is rare is Grisham’s feat of keeping up the pace of producing, on average, a novel a year (in 2017 he published two) without a notable diminishment of ingenuity or literary quality. Dame Agatha Christie, who barely paused between books to sharpen pencils during her near-50-year marathon mystery career, is another such marvel. …

Grisham’s main character here is a so-called “innocence lawyer,” a workaholic attorney-and-Episcopal-priest named Cullen Post. Post has trimmed his life down to the barest of essentials, living in spartan quarters above the nonprofit Guardian Ministries, his workplace in Savannah, Ga. The book focuses on Post’s investigation into the wrongful conviction of a black man named Quincy Miller who was set up to take the fall for the murder of a white lawyer in a small Florida town some 22 years before …

WaPo review 

Grisham is a member of the board of directors of the Innocence Project, which campaigns to free and exonerate unjustly convicted people. This book is laser focused on that topic.

This novel was inspired by Jim McCloskey and Centurion Ministries. That organization has freed dozens of wrongfully accused.

When Truth Is All You Have: A Memoir of Faith, Justice, and Freedom for the Wrongly Convicted

John Grisham is an activist and board member for the Innocence Project, an organization that fights to exonerate prisoners it deems wrongfully convicted.

This 2010 book looks at the issues of the death penalty through the wrongful conviction of  17-year-old Donté Drumm. He is a star on the high school football team and loved by the girls.

Donté’s is accused of murdering Nicole  Yarber, a cheerleader.

It’s set in football mad Slone, Texas.

It’s a very good book. Well told. Some might find it a bit preachy. Repetitive in places.

Travis Boyette is the real killer. The most memorable of the characters, for me. Seems Grisham is skilled at writing complex, weird and evil bad guys.

Amazon

I agree with Grisham on the death penalty. I’m against it. And still recall the day I made that decision. It was in a High School class in the 1970s where we were discussing the topic.

I’ll consider the USA a backwards nation until they ban it.

The USA will be backwards until the Republican Party finally starts to evolve their platform in the area of human rights.

United States, Japan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Belarus, Oman, and Taiwan are some of the most prosperous nations that still have it.

Much of the fictional case presented in the novel is taken from some real-life cases involving defendants on death row.