Standard Of Review: John Grisham Goes Rogue In Latest Novel

Harry Graff's verdict: Rogue Lawyer, while not as entertaining as early Grisham classics like The Firm, is a solid novel.

There is no way that John Grisham reads my columns, right? In January, I reviewed Grisham’s 2014 novel Gray Mountain, which was a departure from most novels in his oeuvre. My main criticism of Gray Mountain was that Grisham bit off more than he could chew; instead of a tightly wound legal thriller, the book contains too many disparate plots. As I wrote in my review, “there are two main plot threads and Grisham never clearly picks one and sticks with it. I kept looking at the percentage-read bar at the bottom of my Kindle and wondering when I would figure out what the book was actually about.”

In his new novel, Rogue Lawyer, released on Tuesday, Grisham attempts the same tactic, this time with much more success, making me seriously wonder if he had read my Gray Mountain column and taken my criticism to heart (yes, I know that the chances of Grisham reading my columns are about the same as the chances that the Back to the Future Part II internet hoax will cease to exist after yesterday).

Rogue Lawyer’s protagonist is Sebastian Rudd, a criminal defense attorney specializing in an extremely narrow area of the law: clients that are so unpopular that no other attorney will go near them. For example, as the book opens, Rudd is defending an antisocial, drug-addicted teenager accused of brutally murdering two small girls in a small town that has prejudged him as guilty. This does not deter Rudd, who does not care whether or not his client is innocent or guilty, only that he will be paid (or that he will get enough publicity to get hired again). Rudd constantly risks threats and attempts on his life to defend these unpopular clients. He has a bodyguard, always carries a handgun, and his “office” is a bulletproof van.

Like Gray Mountain, Rogue Lawyer does not have one plotline; instead, it follows Rudd as he defends numerous different clients. Unlike Gray Mountain, though, Rogue Lawyer is much more intelligently structured as a series of vignettes. For example, the aforementioned defense of the teenager accused of double murder is a self-contained story that takes up the first portion of the book, then concludes and is never mentioned again. The book continues in vignette form as Rudd defends a mob boss that murdered his previous attorney, an elderly man accused of killing a police officer during a botched SWAT team raid, and a man suspected to be involved in kidnapping the daughter of a prominent police department higher-up. Towards the end of the book, Grisham mostly abandons the vignette form as the plots cohere, but this tactic works because Grisham had laid the groundwork for all these stories earlier in the novel, and Rudd leverages his defense of one of his clients to help the others. More importantly, partially due to the vignette structure, unlike Gray Mountain, all of these stories have a definite beginning, middle, and end.

Grisham also attempts – with mixed success – to turn Rogue Lawyer into a neo-noir. He populates the novel with a litany of seedy characters, including mobsters, gamblers, and criminals. He refers to the city where the novel takes place merely as “The City,” and describes it as a cesspool of crime and corruption. Grisham also leans heavily on Rudd’s narration (a staple of noir films like Double Indemnity); the novel’s opening line is “My name is Sebastian Rudd.” I typically hate this type of narration in television and film, but it’s slightly more palatable in a book.

The other notable aspect of Rogue Lawyer is that Grisham has certain obvious political agendas. First, the novel is vehemently anti-police, tackling the militarization of police forces, a recent hot-button issue. As mentioned above, one of Rudd’s clients is Doug Renfro, an elderly man who, due to a police error, is wrongly suspected as being part of a drug ring. Instead of sending officers to investigate, a SWAT team barges into Doug’s house during the middle of the night and kills his wife and dog after Doug (believing the police to be criminals) shoots at them with a shotgun. Doug is charged with murdering the officer, and Rudd uses the legal system to expose the the pervasiveness and harmfulness of this nefarious practice. Grisham handles this issue much more elegantly than he handled the issue of strip mining in Gray Mountain; instead of having one character lecture another for pages on end as if reading a Wikipedia page, Grisham utilizes the fictional story to make his point (though I did wonder why Rudd, who specializes in cases no one else wants, would take this case; given this set of facts, surely there would be a litany of attorneys, including the ACLU, champing at the bit to represent Doug).

The book is less successful in taking on the issue of helicopter parenting through its portrayal of Rudd’s ex-wife Judith. Judith has sole custody of their son Starcher (yes, his name is also meant to be an indictment of this sort of parent) and proceeds to baby him in every way imaginable, putting extremely strict rules on the things he can do, the food he can eat, and the people he can see. While I agree with Grisham’s point of view (if I had helicopter parents, I wouldn’t be able to make so many 1990s pop culture references in my columns), he portrays Judith as an over-the-top caricature, not willing to budge an inch in negotiations with Rudd and unable to see the damage that her overprotectiveness is doing to her child. Judith is also the epitome of the evil ex-wife trope, running to family court over every disagreement with Rudd.

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Rogue Lawyer is not nearly as entertaining as early Grisham classics like The Firm and The Client. But it is a solid novel, firmly within the upper echelon of late-period Grisham, and unquestionably better than Gray Mountain. And if Grisham really does read my columns, then hopefully he knows not to fall for the Back to the Future Part II internet hoax in the future.

(Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book, and all links to books are Amazon affiliate links.)

Rogue Lawyer [Amazon (affiliate link)]


Harry Graff is a litigation associate at a firm, but he spends days wishing that he was writing about film, television, literature, and pop culture instead of writing briefs. If there is a law-related movie, television show, book, or any other form of media that you would like Harry Graff to discuss, he can be reached at harrygraff19@gmail.com. Be sure to follow Harry Graff on Twitter at @harrygraff19.

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