John Grisham's first novel,
A Time to Kill, is a courtroom drama set in 1980s Clanton, Mississippi. A 10-year-old girl is raped and left for dead by two men, who are subsequently arrested for the crime. The father, Vietnam veteran Carl Lee Hailey, acquires an M-16 and kills them both as they exit the courthouse after their hearing. This seems pretty cut and dry: except it becomes a huge controversy in the small town, because Carl Lee and his daughter are black, and the two men are white. These days, most people I think would either think "so?" or else would not admit to having a prejudice, but this is a small Southern town with a mostly white population, and being that it is the 1980s, the Civil Rights Movement really wasn't all that long ago. So there is a strong racial overtone to the issue, and this sets the stage for the rest of the book, especially when Carl Lee's trial makes national news, and the KKK gets involved.
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I'll be honest with you guys. Courtroom drama and legal thrillers are not really my thing. Sure, I am studying criminal justice as a minor, but my concentration is in forensics: I'm more interested in the investigation and laboratory analysis side of things, not so much the hanging-around-in-a-courthouse-and-meeting-with-lawyers side of things. So if this book had not been assigned for the criminal justice class I've been taking this summer, I would probably not have ever bothered to pick this up. It was my first time reading Grisham, and may well be the last. I know he is a best-selling author, but this just was not for me. I haven't seen the movie adaptation, so maybe adding a live-action element makes the story more compelling, but as far as the book goes, I was actually pretty bored through about 99% of it.
