John GrishamA Time to KillMonika says:
In a small southern town 10 year old Tonya Hailey is brutally raped by two drunks. They are soon arrested and another drama takes place in the court building. The girl’s father shoots the rapists and a stray bullet injures a police officer. Normally the father could be sure to find a sympathetic jury in his home district, if it weren’t for one small detail: the color of Carl Lee Hailey’s skin. The jury can’t decide whether a black man should be treated like a white man. His young lawyer Jake Brigance has a hard time of it, and it looks like Jake’s career will be over before it has really begun if he can’t win this case. A TIME TO KILL was the forth book I read by Grisham. I liked THE FIRM, THE CHAMBER and THE RAINMAKER, some more, some less, but A TIME TO KILL was probably the last Grisham for me. Perhaps you get fed up with legal dramas faster than with other genres, but A TIME TO KILL didn’t manage to hold my attention for long. A reason could be the repetitive format. It seems that once you’ve read one Grisham you’ve read them all. They always revolve around a very young, very dynamic lawyer fighting to get started in his profession. Only the case varies, which seems to be sufficient for many readers to pick up other works by the author. The about 600 pages of A TIME TO KILL contain some highlights, but in between the plot is boring enough to put you to sleep. All the cliches about the South are present including the Ku-Klux-Klan. Of all the lackluster characters only the defendant has a little personality. The young lawyer is politically correct to the point of nausea. As long as his wife is around he is the perfect husband and father, but as soon as she leaves town he acts like in his wild student days. It’s so bad you almost wish for him to lose the case, but that blatant injustice would hurt the defendant, the only person in the book I was able to sympathize with. Amazingly Grisham is one of the best selling (and most read?) authors of recent years. I wonder who can read more than three or four of his books and still love him. An unfathomable mystery that might have driven Sherlock Holmes to dispair. |
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Last changes: 27/04/03 Copyright 2000 Christina Gross & Monika Hübner |
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