Jake knows that no good can come of his decision to represent Drew. Clanton reserves a special level of hatred for cop killers. He’s charged with capital murder, which carries the death penalty. As she lies there, apparently dead, her 16-year-old son, Drew, grabs the cop’s gun and kills him in a fit of fury and fear. A sheriff’s deputy comes home drunk and violent, and proceeds to beat his girlfriend unconscious while her two teenage children cower upstairs. Grisham lays out the grisly back story in the tense opening pages. Once again, he is broke once again, he takes on a case nobody else wants once again, he finds himself saddled with a client whose excellent reasons for committing murder do not change the fact that he is indeed guilty. (How satisfying to see time plodding along at its own pace, back in those sleepy days before smartphones or the internet.) Jake is still living with the repercussions of the earlier murder trial. Thirty-one years have passed in the real world since we were first in Clanton, but only five in its fictional life. (Among other things, this client left most of his considerable fortune not to his children but to his Black housekeeper, and not for the reasons you might think.) And now comes “A Time for Mercy.” You get the feeling that Grisham, who has written several dozen books by now, has returned to the place closest to his heart. Jake reappeared in “Sycamore Row” (2013), this time in the service of a recently deceased client with an idiosyncratic view of estate planning. Some readers like it best of all Grisham’s books. The novel is a nuanced, sensitive portrait of a particular time and place in a rural south still riven by racial discord and infected by the Ku Klux Klan, a fine work wrapped inside a legal thriller. Set in 1985 in the fictional town of Clanton, Miss., “A Time to Kill” described Jake’s defense of an undeniably guilty but very sympathetic client - a Black man on trial for killing the two white men who brutally raped his 10-year-old daughter. He first appeared more than 30 years ago in Grisham’s debut novel, “A Time to Kill” (1989), which began with a printing of 5,000 copies but became a runaway best seller (and a movie, starring Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock) after the explosive popularity of Grisham’s second novel, “The Firm” (1991), which didn’t feature Brigance. “A Time for Mercy” is the third John Grisham novel to feature Brigance, a small-town Mississippi lawyer specializing in unpopular, seemingly unwinnable cases.
It’s reassuring to remember that not everyone is crazy and unpredictable, and that books, even books about crime and punishment, can help restore our equilibrium in this season of high anxiety. It’s nice to return to the courtroom with someone we trust. Hello again, Jake Brigance! You’ve come back at the right time.
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