A killer return

THE LAST JUROR by John Grisham (Century, £17.99)

In 1970 Willie Traynor, the first-person narrator of John Grisham's latest novel, was a 23-year-old long-haired college dropout living in Clanton, Mississippi, and working for the local paper, the Ford County Times. When this went bankrupt, possibly because its owner and editor refused to write anything but obituaries, Willie borrowed $50,000 from his grandmother, bought the paper, cut his hair, acquired a suit and a white Panama, à la Mark Twain, and set about turning loss into profit.

He sold a lot of copies when the paper covered the story of the brutal rape and murder of Rhoda Kassellaw in front of her two children: the kind of crime that was almost unknown in the county. The killer, Danny Padgitt, whom Rhoda had named before she died, was a member of the county's most notorious family: moonshiners, bootleggers, drug-dealers, gun-runners, and just plain criminals, and no lawman - apart from the corrupt sheriffs they owned - had ever set foot on Padgitt Island and come back alive.

Though they bribed witnesses to commit perjury, and though Danny threatened the members of the jury with death if he were found guilty, they stood by their beliefs and convicted him. Nevertheless, because they weren't unanimous in recommending execution, he was sentenced to life - which then in Mississippi was only 10 years or less in jail. Nine years later he was paroled, returned to Ford County, and retribution began.

Though this is the central plot of the novel, which probably occupies most of its pages, it is at times treated rather perfunctorily, and it seems obvious that John Grisham's real interests are elsewhere. First, the novel can be read as a history of the American South during the Seventies: the desegregation of schools, the impact of the war in Vietnam, the arrival of the discount store, which bankrupts the old-fashioned businesses and turns the centre of Clanton into a desert. But more than this, the novel is the story of Willie himself, the story of how he grows up and matures, and in the end grows out of the Ford County Times. And it is the story of the ever-increasing influence on him of Calia Ruffin, a deeply devout black woman, who has been married to her husband, Esau, for 40 years and raised eight children, seven of whom have earned PhDs and are college professors.

Though at first Willie is attracted by her wonderful home cooking - he lunches with her every Thursday - he gradually comes to appreciate her faith and her unflinching resolve always to do what she believes to be right.

If his reports in the paper of the different varieties of religion offered in the 88 churches of the county initially have a tinge of the satiric, by the end this has been lost as he, holding Calia's hand during her last illness, finds faith himself.

Though The Last Juror can hardly be said to be gripping in the manner of Grisham's earlier novels - it meanders far too digressively for that - it is at the same time wholly engrossing. Willie is an engaging character; John Grisham's story-telling knack has not deserted him; and the hint that something more serious is at stake than the solution of a crime gives the narrative an extra depth.