Book Review: The Last Juror by John Grisham (2004)

 

At my current place of employment, I spend a lot of time listening to audio of various forms. I would listen to movies on my DVD player (Jackie Chan movies are far more entertaining to watch), to various podcasts, to basketball games during the NBA season, and audiobooks. The most recent selection that I finished happens to be the one reviewed here. It certainly began as a breath of fresh air after listening to Orwell's depression-inducing 1984 and is brilliantly read by Michael Bick. While I usually could stand one hour-long disc at a time of Orwell, I was hooked into listening to four discs in one sitting with Grisham. It certainly began as an engaging story about a young journalist fresh out of college and buying a weekly newspaper that served rural Mississippi. It is told in the first-person perspective of him recalling the events decades later. 

I will refrain from talking too much about the plot, as this tends to spoil things. In fact, I would advise against reading the back cover synopsis (and would extend this advice to just about any novel) since in this case it happened to detail events that did not occur until three or four discs in. Luckily, I had not looked at the synopsis until after finishing the audiobook. However, I am willing to make some general points. Though it started well, The Last Juror seemed to taper off into side plots that had no worthwhile resolution. Indeed, the book ends abruptly with several loose ends. This left me quite unsatisfied, feeling as though I had gone through the trouble of complying with a lengthy process to get a free offer only to find out that the offer was not free at all.

If one is looking for a touted Grisham legal thriller, this is not it. It is mildly entertaining, but if you have a backlog of books to read and movies to see, this should not be near the top of your list.