A Time for Mercy by John Grisham
Mississippi’s Clanton. 1990. When the court names Jake Brigance as the defence counsel for Drew Gamble, a shy sixteen-year-old boy suspected of killing a local deputy, Jake Brigance finds himself caught up in a highly contentious trial. Many people in Clanton desire a speedy trial and the death penalty, but Brigance looks into the matter and finds that there is more to it than first appears. Jake risks the safety of his family, his job, and his financial stability in order to save Drew from the gas chamber.
A Time for Mercy by John Grisham
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We get to know the colourful ensemble of people that so many readers are familiar with and like, as well as the iconic Southern town of Clanton, in what may be John Grisham’s most intimate and brilliant legal thriller of his illustrious career. The end product is a richly fulfilling book that is full of humour, drama, and—most of all—heart. It is both relevant and timeless.
A Time for Mercy is John Grisham’s most potent courtroom drama to date. It is brimming with all the courtroom manoeuvring, small-town intrigue, and spectacular narrative twists that have come to be hallmarks of the master of the legal thriller. There is a right time and a wrong time to kill. A Time for Mercy is now.
Five years have gone since Jake Brigance was forced to handle the most contentious and significant case of his professional career. After witnessing his young daughter, age ten, being viciously attacked by two careless, uncaring young men, Carl Lee Hailey, who was inconsolable with shock, indignation, and grief, sought justice on his own terms. Jake almost lost everything while defending himself: his house, his law firm, his family, and his own life. Jake, Carla, and their daughter Hanna were able to put their lives back together once the verdict was announced, the television news crews left to look for other topics, and the residents of the small town of Clanton, Mississippi, calmed down.
Carla is a teacher, Jake is still an attorney, and Hannah is developing and thriving. Yet in the neighbourhood coffee shop, where the servers don’t have to ask anyone what they want to order, life still pretty much starts over for the Clanton business community each morning. There, everyone knows one another, and news is disseminated long before it appears in the local daily.
Shortly around 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday, Josie “took a deep breath, muttered a quick prayer, and eased to the window to watch” Stuart Kofer’s car as it drew into the driveway at a plain little house six miles south of Clanton “on an old country road that headed nowhere in particular.”
While Josie tried to determine if the car was in control or swaying, she braced herself. Josie, wearing a negligee that had once thrilled Stuart, watched Stuart stumble into the house as Kiera, who is two years younger than Drew, and Drew, who is 16, hid upstairs. Because the three of them had nowhere else to go, Josie had to put up with the beatings that always follow Stuart’s drinking. Grisham depicts what happens after Stuart crashes through the door and discovers Josie still awake in a mesmerizingly terrifying first chapter. The youngsters are listening to a fight in the kitchen when all of a sudden the home is silent.
Stuart stumbles up the stairs and seems like he’s going to the chamber where they’re trying to barricade themselves. He instead makes his way to his own chamber. Drew, though, has had enough. Like Carl Lee Hailey, Drew believes Stuart has finally killed Josie, and he is seeking retribution for his mother, sister, and himself. He places Stuart’s duty gun, a nine-millimetre Glock, one inch from Stuart’s left temple, and pulls the trigger. Having been chosen as the sheriff of Ford County in 1983, Ozzie Wells is still in that position. Because Ozzie is the first black sheriff, the election was historic. He is devastated to have lost a deputy for the first time.
DeWayne Looney was shot by Carl Lee Hailey, losing a portion of his leg, but DeWayne is still employed by the police. Yet in order to look into the murder of one of his own, Ozzie now needs to contact the Mississippi state police. He orders his subordinates to follow the law and place Drew in mechanical restraints (handcuffs), but instead of doing this, he decides to take Drew and Kiera to jail by himself, with the help of his main deputy, Moss Junior Tatum. Tatum has already been informed by Kiera that Drew shot Stuart. Josie and her kids occasionally visited the fundamentalist Good Shepherd Bible Church, which is led by Reverend Charles McGarry, a 26-year-old minister…
