Rogue Lawyer

No Holds Barred

John Grisham’s last book, Grey Mountain was a grim indictment of the coal mining lobby’s destruction of the environment, and the committed lawyers who fight them. His latest, Rogue Lawyer is comparatively a light read, probably written to be picked up by Hollywood.

Grisham has created a rabble-rousing hero, Sebastian Rudd, who takes cases nobody else will touch and enjoys the media attention his notoriety gets him, and, of course, the admiration his courtroom wins fetch. Since he often butts heads with cops as well as mobsters, his office was firebombed and he functions out of a bulletproof van equipped to function as a mobile office. (Probably inspired by Michael Connelly’s Lincoln Lawyer books).

Rudd believes, “A lawyer like me is forced to work in the shadows. My opponents are protected by badges, uniforms, and all the myriad trappings of government power. They are sworn and duty-bound to uphold the law, but since they cheat like hell it forces me to cheat even more.”

The first case that he handles as the book opens, is that of a brain damaged, grimy teenager named Gardy who is accused of the double murder of two girls in a small town called Milo. No lawyer wants to defend him, so Rudd does, because he hates the small town smug righteousness that proclaims a boy guilty in spite of enough evidence of his innocence. Rudd also loves the idea of having to “claw and raise hell in a courtroom where no one is listening.” The townsfolk are so hostile that Rudd and his buddy/bodyguard called Partner, have to keep changing motels to avoid attack.

He wins this case, which is like a prologue to the rest of the hell-raising he does. Gardy does not appear again, but the other cases are linked.  The most moving is that of a senior citizen whose house is mistakenly attacked by cops conducting a narcotics raid. In the melee, his wife is killed and a cop injured. Even though the error is established in no time, the cops won’t admit to it and want to haul the hapless old man over the coals. How Rudd brings the city’s (it is not clear which one) administration to its knees makes one accord to the ‘rogue’ a grudging admiration. Grisham also lays bare the corruption, wheeling-dealing and biases in the US legal system, which people outside the country seem to think is above board.

Then there’s a gangster client on death row and Rudd has no scruples about that.  He says in his first person narrative, “My clients are almost always guilty, so I don’t waste a lot of time wringing my hands about whether they get what they deserve.” How the gangster deals with his imprisonment and conviction is hilarious – and very likely to be copied by Bollywood filmmakers (provided they read, of course.)

Rudd also funds a Hispanic cage fighter, who beats a referee to death in full view of an audience and then expects to walk out of jail. Then there’s the sinister flesh trader, who kidnaps the daughter of a cop, and leads Rudd and the entire police force to distraction with his lies and subterfuge. The cops are not exactly spotlessly clean—when they want information from Rudd, they kidnap his son. Rudd’s troubled relationship with his lesbian ex-wife is the weakest part of the book; Grisham makes the mother sound like a harridan because she disapproves of Rudd’s belief that a boy should be manned up by being exposed to violence.

This hitch aside, Rogue Lawyer is a hugely entertaining thriller and it looks like Rudd will star in a series. A character like that can’t be abandoned after just one book.

Rogue Lawyer

By John Grisham

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Pages: 344