Finished Mo 5/12/25
This was a hardback that Janny loaned to me.
The premise is that a man confesses to the rape and murder of a girl, however a man is on death row for the same crime. The wrong man is put to death. This is the first time that this has happened. The wrong man has been executed for a crime that he didn't commit.
I found this hard to believe. You would think that since so many have been executed, that it's almost impossible that they haven't made this mistake before. I couldn't find a definitive case on the internet.
I was surprised at all of the negative reviews of this book. Many felt that it was not really a novel, but more of a plea to end the barbaric practice of state sponsered execution. It seemed that if you were against the death penalty, you liked the book, and if you were 'pro death penalty', you disliked the book.
From Publishers Weekly.com"
"Grisham's recent slump continues with another subpar effort whose plot and characters, none of whom are painted in shades of gray, aren't able to support an earnest protest against the death penalty. In 2007, almost on the eve of the execution of Donté Drumm, an African-American college football star, for the 1998 murder of a white cheerleader whose body was never found, Travis Boyette, a creepy multiple sex offender, confesses that he's guilty of the crime to Kansas minister Keith Schroeder. With Drumm's legal options dwindling fast and with the threat of civil unrest in his Texas hometown if the execution proceeds, Schroeder battles to convince Boyette to go public with the truth—and to persuade the condemned man's attorney that Boyette's story needs to be taken seriously. While the action progresses with a certain grim realism, Schroeder's superficial responses to the issues raised undercut the impact. As with The Appeal, the author's passionate views on serious flaws in the justice system don't translate well into fiction."
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