A Time to Kill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0440211727 ISBN 13: 9780440211723

Publisher: Island Books, 1992

In this searing courtroom drama, best-selling  author John Grisham probes the savage depths of  racial violence... as he delivers a compelling tale  of uncertain justice in a small southern  town...

Clanton, Mississippi. The life of a  ten-year-old girl is shattered by two drunken and  remorseless young man. The mostly white town reacts  with shock and horror at the inhuman crime. Until  her black father acquires an assault rifle -- and  takes justice into his own outraged hands.

For ten days, as burning crosses and the crack of  sniper fire spread through the streets of  Clanton, the nation sits spellbound as young defense  attorney Jake Brigance struggles to save his  client's life... and then his own...

Review:

This addictive tale of a young lawyer defending a black Vietnam war hero who kills the white druggies who raped his child in tiny Clanton, Mississippi, is John Grisham's first novel, and his favorite of his first six. He polished it for three years and every detail shines like pebbles at the bottom of a swift, sunlit stream. Grisham is a born legal storyteller and his dialogue is pitch perfect.

The plot turns with jeweled precision. Carl Lee Hailey gets an M-16 from the Chicago hoodlum he'd saved at Da Nang, wastes the rapists on the courthouse steps, then turns to attorney Jake Brigance, who needs a conspicuous win to boost his career. Folks want to give Carl Lee a second medal, but how can they ignore premeditated execution? The town is split, revealing its social structure. Blacks note that a white man shooting a black rapist would be acquitted; the KKK starts a new Clanton chapter; the NAACP, the ambitious local reverend, a snobby, Harvard-infested big local firm, and others try to outmaneuver Jake and his brilliant, disbarred drunk of an ex-law partner. Jake hits the books and the bottle himself. Crosses burn, people die, crowds chant "Free Carl Lee!" and "Fry Carl Lee!" in the antiphony of America's classical tragedy. Because he's lived in Oxford, Mississippi, Grisham gets compared to Faulkner, but he's really got the lean style and fierce folk moralism of John Steinbeck. --Tim Appelo

From the Back Cover:

"Grisham's pleasure in relating the Byzantine complexities of Clanton (Mississippi) politics is contagious and he tells a good story...An enjoyable book." -- Library Journal.

"Grisham excels!" -- Dallas Times Herald.