The book is advertised in most places as one that takes up where his first work, A Time To Kill, ended, which sort of is slightly misleading and leads one to go on expecting and speculating about how and when this connection is coming to light, thereby spoiling the absorption of the reading itself and the joy thereof. Given that it is about continuing from where the first book left off, one also tends to be apprehensive, and really the justification for that appears only much later, while one could enjoy the story far better if it were not for the advertisements.
The lawyer who fought for the unfortunate father in the first story is the centre here in the foreground while other characters are central to the story but stay slightly off or in the background, and it could be argued that the main character dies before the story opens - with an employee going off to meet his boss and finding him precisely where instructed but in circumstances and condition far from anticipated. From then on it is about the man who committed suicide in so very precise albeit unpleasant a manner, questions about whether he was in his right mind and whether the will he wrote by hand the day before is valid, and more.
The shock of his having left the bulk of his estate to his housekeeper who happens to be black while explicitly depriving his children and grandchildren sets off a furore, all the more because he made a will a year or so before leaving them it all reasonably, and the only clue or point of curiosity for a disinterested person is the way he mentions his little brother whom he has left five per cent of it along with his church which he left another five per cent. But if part of the readership is disinterested, the people in the story are definitely not, it being set in Mississippi albeit in post lynching era (or is it?) - and most people in the book question whether the housekeeper was more than a mere caretaker, especially since it is considered inconceivable that a poor black woman could deserve so much money only by being a caregiver along with a housekeeper of an old man, however distant he be from everyone else and however little his kith and kin visit or even call him.
One wonders if the people would be a little less questioning of the beneficiary's character if she were an Irish or English person of the "right" race, or a man of the "right" race.
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Grisham gives the details of the fight the protagonist, the lawyer for the estate who was chosen by the deceased for the very reason of his having fought for the unfortunate father in the previous story, has to face to do his job, which is to fight for the holographic will and to see to it that his - the deceased's - kith and kin get nothing with the one exception of the brother whose whereabouts are unknown, including if he is alive at all. He has to walk a delicate balance to carry on the job he is given while trying his best to see to it that the potential jury pool that is most likely to be of the dominant race is not antagonised, and his job is not easy, even when - according to him - racism is on the wane.
Since the civil war in US there have been hundreds of lynchings and most of those were of black men women and children, with the exception of a few of horse thieves in the western states before the advent of the mechanical vehicle and its replacing the horse as the means of survival. Mississippi leads in the lynchings with Georgia and Texas close on its heels, and one wonders if Alabama merely hid it all well - for while hundreds are counted for, far more are not counted, in those days when birth and death records were not kept all that scrupulously and a black man, woman or child being murdered by anyone or a horde of the dominant race would not only be not counted as murder but be colluded with by the law enforcement authorities of the state, at any rate local ones.
And all this horror is now a horror to people of the state as well, according to the author - they would like to distance themselves from it, to do reparations if possible and would be ashamed of any ancestors who were part of it; and the story is about one such person who has gone to extraordinary lengths to attempt to correct the horrors perpetrated that he knew of. Fortunately there is someone who has witnessed it with him, and is able to relate it. Else the deprivation of the victims of injustice would continue fresh - and quite possibly, very likely, it does in most places. But this is a story that satisfies and a huge part of it is the satisfactory attempt to correct the injustices of the past.
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