Book Review: The Widow by John Grisham

Book Review: The Widow by John Grisham

4/5 stars. John Grisham writes about intriguing legal situations, populates those stories with a variety of lawyers, and creates an atmosphere that reflects the world around us. With his recent forays into non-fiction stories of wrongly convicted men and women, I am not surprised to see that this story becomes a mystery like one of these true-life events. For the first half of this novel, Grisham is setting up the story to come, but it honestly becomes a bit tedious in the telling. I understand why the story was told this way, but it was not until about the halfway point that the story really found its focus and started moving forward. 

The main character of this story, Simon Latch, a bankruptcy attorney living in a small city in Northern Virginia, barely making enough money to support his family and his gambling habits, is not a likeable person. In fact, there were times during this story when I was ready to DNF this book just because of his character and his personal actions; however, as the story progresses, I found myself routing for a good outcome for him and his family. This narrative is filled with the types of characters that we would find in any local community, many of them participating in activities that we do not often think about in our day-to-day existence – at least for most of us. Our main character has no issues interacting with most of these unusual suspects.

Overall, this was a very good mystery/legal thriller from an established, talented author. I have read several of his legal thrillers over the years and I found this novel to be a nice change from his usual stories. In particular, his main character, though I disliked him at times, was much more of an ‘everyman’ character than many of Grisham’s protagonists. I recommend checking out this title. There are some meaningful points to be learned from this, especially that maybe we should all try to be the best people we can be, regardless of our circumstances!