The WIDOW
John Grisham
Synopsis
Simon Latch is a lawyer in rural Virginia, making just enough to pay his bills while his marriage slowly falls apart. Then into his office walks Eleanor Barnett, an elderly widow in need of a new will. Apparently, her husband left her a small fortune, and no one knows about it.
Once he hooks the richest client of his career, Simon works quietly to keep her wealth under the radar. But soon her story begins to crack. When she is hospitalized after a car accident, Simon realizes that nothing is as it seems, and he finds himself on trial for a crime he swears he didn’t commit: murder.
Simon knows he’s innocent. But he also knows the circumstantial evidence is against him, and he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. To save himself, he must find the real killer…
Richard says
It’s amazing how Grisham can milk a story, run it on and on without really advancing the plot at all. He does this very effectively in The Widow, page after page. You end up saying. “Enough already. Let’s get to the point.”
The Widow, like any of Grisham’s books, is polished, well-written and quite engaging. The story is about a hard done by lawyer scoring a potentially big client in her 80’s. She seems to be very rich, on the books, and the lawyer dreams he has finally hit the big time. Well, the story takes you down the path of giving his dream reality as he searches for the truth of her wealth. Search, search, search…she is murdered in the hospital after a car crash. The lawyer is the prime suspect and Grisham now unfolds the suspense point of his story. It’s very short, very brief, the search for the real killer.
An engaging story, milked for all it’s worth but no substance. In short, I found The Widow disappointing, a lot of reading of little substance.
