by John Grisham, 2006, Audible Audio Edition, narrated by Craig Wasson, 2006

I listened to this book on CD driving down to Florida from Rhode Island this year.  I didn’t pay much attention to it when I checked it out from the Narragansett Library, so when I put it on, I thought it was fiction.  I went through the first one or two CDs before I finally figured out that Grisham had written this non-fiction account of a trial in Oklahoma. Until that time I was thinking that the book had way too much detail to be an enjoyable.

The book was interesting, but Grisham seems a bit too emotionally involved to give an unbiased account of what happened.  The individual who was falsely convicted had some deep character flaws which made it somewhat difficult  for me to totally sympathize with him.  Grisham does, however, show how the justice system can miscarry to convict an innocent individual, especially in a case where some law enforcement officers are corrupted with drug dealings.  I wish that Grisham had delved into the police corruption angle a bit more as he only touched on that aspect. The focus of the book seemed to be more on the impact of the wrong conviction on the individual rather than the underlying causes of it and this made the narrative a bit repetitive.