Rating: 
Summary: What Were You Thinking?
Review: I had such high hopes for "The Last Juror". This novel started off with a bang and then fizzled very quickly. This was like reading a road map but without a destination. Having "The Last Juror" as the title was very misleading because I was expecting all types of twists and turns indicative of previous Grisham novels, instead I ended up just grateful that I checked this out of the library. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone buy this book. Please help your local library's circulation numbers and check it out. It seems that Mr. Grisham's characters are as tired as he is. Maybe he doesn't want to play the suspense game anymore. If that's the case Mr. Grisham please stop writing novels under the cloak of legal suspense and call it a wrap.
Rating: 
Summary: The Well is Bone Dry
Review: I have read 12 of Grisham's 17 novels. He truly gave the best of himself at the beginning of his writing career and has been on a downhill slide ever since. He used to write books that I literally could not put down. I had to force myself to finish this book. It had none of the page-turning, pulse-pounding suspense of his earlier books. It was just...boring. On top of that I found it to be sloppy, too. There were times when he told us (again) what he had just told us 2 pages earlier. Whoever edited this book also missed several mistakes (Miss Callie would have counted!)Want good Grisham? Go back and just reread his older stuff because he's obviously not going to give us anything new that comes anywhere near his earlier books. If you're dead set of reading this, check it out from the library. Don't waste money on it.
Rating: 
Summary: Grisham explores new avenues
Review: Master storyteller has tried to view at the legal proceedings with a journalist's (who is an outright opportunist, albeit with some moral standing) perspective. The descriptions of the events in the courtroom are pretty repetitive. A nasty defence lawyer with no ethical groundings, a domineering judge who's supportive to the victim, a diverse and vacillating jury and a small town setting. Sounds familier?
But all said and done, there are very few individuals who can spin a story around a single disturbing event. Although this time, the most critical ingredient of Grisham's tales is lacking. Strong characters. Be it The Rainmaker, The Firm or even the offbeat A Painted House, they all had very well defined characters who all had a role to play in the climax of the story. This is where the book falls short of expectations. Perhaps the element of suspense would have saved the day. But the suspense builds up in parts and looses momentum midway before picking up little bit in the end. A uniform thread of suspense would have held the diverse events together.
Maybe something better is coming our way from Grisham next time!
Rating:
Summary: Those were the days
Review: Kind of reminds me of a good ol' boy talking about the ol' days and oh, by the way, let's throw about 4 pages of story into all the reminiscing.
Rating: 
Summary: Grisham's Still Water Runs Deep
Review: "The Last Juror" is neither "The Firm" nor "the Pelican Brief", nor is it similar to "A Time for Killing" which shares "Juror's" Ford County, Mississippi, setting. But it is a powerful novel in its own right, combining the elements of classic Grisham courtroom drama with a nostalgic study of life in rural Mississippi. The main story is of the brutal rape and murder of a young widow. The alleged murderer, Danny Padgitt, is the youngest son of the wealthy but reclusive local gentry. Protagonist Willie Traynor, Memphis-born and Syracuse-educated, migrates to Clanton and, with the help of a rich aunt, buys the dying local newspaper. So while the story is ostensibly one of the crime and subsequent retribution, it is also a poignant tale of the decade-long relationship that develops between Traynor and "Miss" Callie Ruffin, matriarch of a poor but proud black family of Clanton. Just as the Big Brown River and its creeks and sloughs wind through the meadows of Ford County, Grisham's prose meanders through sub-plots, anecdotes and banalities of the small-town south. Grisham is in no hurry to get to the climax - indeed the recipe for Miss Callie's pot roast is hardly a page-turner. But the pace of the prose is a conscious and necessary element of the author's message, and seemingly unconnected events eventually tie together to complete the portrait of Grisham's South. And if the weighty topics of civil rights and Viet Nam are axes Grisham chooses to grind, he treats them with sensitivity and respect, and is neither heavy-handed nor judgmental in his delivery. The reader looking for a thriller along the lines of Grisham's fine earlier works may be disappointed, but it would be vastly unfair to dismiss this novel. "The Last Juror" is thoughtful and thought provoking literature; an example of a fine American story teller broadening his scope and delving deeper into familiar topics.
Rating:
Summary: Out of Ideas
Review: This is by far the worst Grisham yet. Too many Good Ole Boys, Bubbas and babbling. Absolutely no suspense, drama or reason to continue reading. Fall asleep on the front porch of an historic falling-down old home in a boring small town with this one. Let's hope Grisham hangs up his lucrative contractual hat with this bomb. Pass this up for almost any David Baldacci or Dan Brown read you can get your hands on.
Rating:
Summary: Nolo Contendere
Review: The Last Juror is not John Grisham's finest work. Missing are the compelling contemporary issues, high throttled suspense, and all around passions that pervade early novels such as A Time to Kill, The Chamber, The Firm, or even The Runaway Jury. The Last Juror is at least 100 pages too long for its plotline, and its ending is evident long before the final pages. The book starts fast: the story of a grisly rape and murder, and subsequent trial make for some page-turning. A jury is presented with the classic question: life in prison or the death sentence? Hardly suspenseful, for the deliberations (not at all sketched by Grisham) come only halfway through the novel, and the book jacket has all but given the ensuing plot away anyway. So the reader trudges through the next decade of the novel's storyline, year by boring year. Ostensibly, the narrator, owner of the local newspaper in the small Mississippi town (same setting as A Time to Kill) must fill us in on every detail of life that happens between this first trial and the ultimate (hey, no surprise here at all...) parole of the threatening killer. Every column, obituary, advertisement ever published by narrator's paper, The Ford County Times, is chronicled. Grisham drags us through the young man's haberdashery conversion, his social life (quite dull), his religious research (gee, there are a lot of enthusiastic Christian churches in the Bible Belt, no kidding?), and his eating and sleeping habits. By the time the protagonist has built up his business, we feel we, too, have earned shares in the venture. We don't really delve back into any real action until the final sixty pages of the book. OK, again no surprises (it's on the book jacket): someone is killing the jurors who originally convicted our parolee. Even then, there is little suspense. We have the list of jurors, we are waiting for the killings and final resolution. Grisham could have done much better with the topic of parole injustice, and he certainly missed the boat on this one. This book should have been released during the Willie Horton days of Dukakis v. Bush. It might have held more interest.
Rating:
Summary: Grisham needs a pseudonym
Review: After reading a number of other booklovers' reviews, I get the distinct impression that Grisham had durn well better write a thriller, or his biggest fans will be disappointed. Not me. I think the non-thriller-lawyer books he writes are better than the others. There's just so many times you can bring out that tired old attorney-in-trouble recipe and make it work (see Clancy, King, Cornwell, etc., for examples of going to the well once too often). If his books such as "Skipping Christmas," "Bleachers," and "A Painted House" had been released under another name, it would have kept his diehard fans happy.
Rating:
Summary: Boring, boring, boring
Review: Grisham has definitely lost his edge! Where is the suspense? Where are the page turners we so eagerly awaited since "The King of Torts"? We're sick of reading about racism in the South in the 1970's, we want a book that's a gripping read like his earlier books. Quite a disappointment.
Rating:
Summary: Get an Autographed copy of a great book!
Review: You can bid on an autographed copy of John Grisham's "The Last Juror!" Read more at CMTAuctions.com!
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