Ford County: by John Grisham.

The collection of stories begins with a couple of tales about people all too human, the sort no one thinks about much less write, but finds them familiar when reading as the ones one generally would like to avert eyes from and forget. Most people in the first two stories do that as well, even though in the first one it looks like it is about their neighbours caring.

Grisham comes into his own in the rest, with quiet vengeance of Sidney against casinos in one and a carefully planned exit of a lawyer from his hometown in another. One cheers with the two protagonists, never mind the overall aspects of strict ethics - they have after all been good and been dealt a not too good hand. The lawyer's disenchantment is all too justified post his decision to leave, what with his wife and daughters being more than willing, eager in case of the wife, to get rid of him. Sidney is positively a hero, and there is a danger of a stray reader or so attempting the feat. It takes far too much mental discipline though, at least.

The last one is touching, all too familiar story of a man arriving home to die and the town behaving as if he were worse than the gun toting gangsters most people in US are romanticised by even now, never mind the massacres in schools. The man so shunned has AIDS, and that is merely the topping on a series of crimes that include leaving home - backwater Mississippi - for a big town and living an alternate lifestyle, which most people still consider a choice, never mind the discoveries of science saying otherwise.

All in all a good collection, but not the more usual Grisham thrilling roller-coaster ride from a victim to a justice with vengeance - this is a more quieter journey. It fits rather somewhere between the Painted House and The Firm.