Goines On: Sinister influences

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Goines’ hours today seemed shrouded by a poisoned blanket. He felt no empathy or love for the woman he saw behind the wheel of a car approaching him as he walked to the gym, however outwardly friendly she may have intended her answering wave. More than one man at Walmart earlier had seemed to look at him with ulterior motives, one of them seeming to be trying to warn Goines off from further observation of what the man’s female companion might be up to.

The Confession might do what Jingle Jangle hadn't the clout to do

Maureen Corrigan's review of John Grisham's legal thriller, The Confession (in The Washington Post, October 26, 2010), warns us, "don't read this book if you just want to kick back in your recliner and relax."
    I agree. As I wrote to my daughter, who herself was reading a Richard Jury novel by Martha Grimes, "it's not that easy reading, emotionally, because you know that the suffering of the condemned man in the book, and of his family and friends, has been the real suffering of quite a few people (of whom just one was more than enough)."
    I'm reading The Confession by listening to a digital recording, so I don't think I'd noticed the dust jacket image. I saw it yesterday when I looked up a review to include in my listing of books recently read. I'm struck by its use of the "scales of justice" image, which was stylized by Brooklyn artist Matthew Moss for the dust jacket of Jim Rix's 2007 true crime book, Jingle Jangle: The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out:
   

Because of Grisham's base (over 250 million copies of his books sold worldwide), The Confession could achieve what Jim hoped for Jingle Jangle, which never won enough of a readership to do so—namely, rev up the anti-death penalty momentum a notch or two (not that Jim was attacking the death penalty; he wanted to stop wrongful convictions, especially when based on junk science). The Confession attacks most of the police, prosecutor, judge, jury, prison, and political problems that Jingle Jangle attacked, including the use of jailhouse snitches. But Grisham's book doesn't involve junk science.
    I think that Jingle Jangle outdid Grisham's own true crime book, The Innocent Man, in its harder-hitting, broader critique of the criminal justice system. The Confession also outdoes The Innocent Man, in the much greater and more immediate intensity with which it shows just how wrong, wrong, wrong is our criminal justice system—especially as practiced in Texas (or in the Arizona of Jingle Jangle, where Jim's cousin Ray Krone was sentenced to die for a murder that he didn't commit any more than Donté Drumm committed the fictional murder depicted in Grisham's latest thriller).

I'd be very, very surprised (indeed, shocked) if The Confession isn't made into a movie, the kind of movie Jingle Jangle might have become if the right director and screen writer had picked it up. I don't see any mention of a movie project yet, though, on the Internet Movie Database.
    Grisham is an old-hand at piling on the complications and heightening the conflict. The conflict in The Confession just crackles, it's so intense.

The latest Grisham cup of tea

On Monday night I reached about page 284 in John Grisham's 2009 legal thriller, The Associate. If the book was a cup of tea, it still had heat to that point. But last night, as I read the last ninety pages, the heat fled, and I was let down to realize that for all the tea's comforting warmth for three-fourths of the cup, it had little flavor or body. Just not that good a tea.
    I'm left wondering, though, whether Grisham's depiction of big law firms as using the best and brightest young law school graduates to operate a sort of billing mill is accurate. Do they really set their associates to spend long hours doing research they know will likely never be used but for the purpose of billing a client for the privilege?
    Also, since the bad guy....No, I can't go there. I might spoil whatever plot enjoyment you could otherwise slurp from Grisham's latest disappointing cup. (The ending is reminiscent of the unsatisfactory, if clever, way Nelson DeMille ended his 2004 novel, Nightfall.)
    For a much fuller bodied, more savory tea, I recommend John Le Carré's latest, A Most Wanted Man. It actually gets hotter as it goes along, up to the very last delectable sip, so apt a comment on the Bushevik foreign policy it delivers a kick to the American groin.