The Last Juror – John Grisham

I thought I’d start with something easygoing. It was either that or an Agatha Christie. I will tell you what I was expecting: I was expecting murder and trial, blood, gore, suspense, counting down the remaining jurors, conspiracies, corruption, Julia Roberts running towards Denzel Washington, Tom Cruise panicking… You get the picture. Seeing from the synopsis at the back I should have got at least half of what I expected. Except maybe for the Hollywood celebrities…

The synopsis suggested that this was going to be a story where a brutal rape and murder occurs, the culprit is caught and sentenced but before he is taken to jail he vows to kill off the Jury that sentenced him. Ten years later he gets out and all hell breaks loose.

Well, the synopsis was absolutely right, we had a rape and murder (quite graphically described btw, taught me to double check the back door was locked! Scaaaary…) and a trial where the defendant was found guilty. This is set in a small town in Mississippi, in the 1970’s. The story is told from the point of view of a newcomer in the town, who is the new editor of the local weekly paper. The writing is great, easygoing, direct, it makes you visualise the story (even when you really don’t want to…) and he makes the protagonist feel like someone you know and care about. But even though all that is in the synopsis is actually in the book, it hardly seems the main focus of the story. Don’t get me wrong, you will get your money’s worth for the first 250 pages, where the crime occurs and the trial happens but then the book somehow enters the limbo of random pieces of information. It spends 150 pages focusing on other issues such as civil rights, religious beliefs, the Vietnam war, all of which are very interesting to debate and read about, and do help put the story into perspective but feel a bit…random. It also is, in a way, a bit unfair to have such important topics all crammed in 150 pages, with sprinklings of “the prisoner is now appealing for parole” to keep the reader hooked. It was a bit weird. And then for the last 100 pages of the book you get the juror killings that the title and the synopsis promised…

I will… try… not to spoil it too much but it felt as if the whole ending was rushed and not really thought through. Everything was a bit too obvious, I’m not saying I needed a really wacky twist but something a bit more challenging would have been nice. I know all this sounds like horrible criticism, and it’s not meant to be that way, I actually enjoyed reading it. I just think I would have been less agitated if the synopsis said nothing about juror killings and the book was called something like Crime in Mississippi (Aren’t I imaginative….). The expectations were a bit too high, I liked it, but I do feel just a tiny bit let down…

Enjoyed it?: I think so… Ask me again in two weeks…

Read again? No.

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