"The Guardians" is a Solid Grisham Novel

 

“The Guardians” by John Grisham is a solid legal thriller, with a slightly different twist from the other Grisham novels. The main character, Cullen Post, isn’t just a lawyer but he’s also an Episcopal priest who works at a non-profit called Guardian Ministries. The main goal of the ministry is helping wrongly accused people get out of prison by getting him or her a new trial. His new case is about a 20-year-old year murder of a lawyer and the man wrongly accused of his murder, Quincy Miller. Miller is an African American man who was convicted by a largely white jury in Florida and was speared the death penalty by one vote. However, new evidence suggests he didn’t do the crime, and it’s up to Cullen Post to collect the evidence and convince the state of Florida to re-examine the case.

For the most part, this novel is told in the first person, which is well written. However, Grisham occasionally slips into third person narration in a couple scenes. James Patterson does this a lot in his books, but I have yet to see this in a Grisham novel. I don’t usually like novels that go between first and third person in their narratives, because I think it’s a lazy device. However, it doesn’t happen too much in this novel, so I was fine with it.

There’s a lot of side plots in this novel, with Post talking about his reasons for becoming a priest, and his unusual life choices. This being a Grisham novel, though, the story mostly stays focused on the case.

You can tell this is a cause close to Grisham’s personal point of view.  Grisham in real life has made the wrongly accused his cause, working and promoting the Innocence Project and even co-authoring a nonfiction book on people who have been wrongly accused. Grisham has also been publicly against the death penalty.

This book is a solid page turner, as are all Grisham novels. You want to know if Quincy Miller gets off his jail term or not, and while you can probably tell how this is going to end, you will also continuously keep turning pages. This novel does take you in some directions you don’t see coming, and is well worth the read, as are most Grisham novels.