Rogue Lawyer: A Novel Hardcover – October 20, 2015

Terrific book from an author who had become formulaic.Rogue lawyer was captivating and well written. In the traditional legal thriller, and in the cop drama, the milieu is of a somewhat corrupted legal system. Here the milieu is a a completely insane and corrupted system. The protagonist is not completely likable and is also a rule breaker, if not transiently corrupt himself. The arm chair reader can see that he is clinically depressed and mixed in with his depression is is a very angry ex-wife about which he is ambivalent and still somewhat in love.Grisham has worked for the Innocence Project and has lost his innocence. Much of the book was about the injustice and lack of accountability in the legal system. The large injustice is some militarized police serving a warrant in the form a a guerrilla raid with excessive armament and violence. Death results and the family they attacked had done nothing wrong. The author highlights how the laws in many states protect the cops even when they are totally wrong. His victims are white and there is not racial element on the injustice. The excessive power and overreach of the police is a story that needs to be told and told in a way that shows that none of us are safe. The overreach usually damages the less privileged and the author has done us a service to show that it can damage any of us.There is some cage fighting, which is violent. Grisham works on how the crowd feeds off the violence.There is a sociopath who is manipulating the protagonist for his own ends. One implausible part is that there is confusion about whether the sociopath is a client. He signed a contract and paid a retainer with a bad check.I thought some of the confusion to be overstated.The structure is one of several cases and overlapping short stories. I liked the structure because it left time for character development, There is no expectation that "good will prevail" and flawed is the most favorable adjective that can be applied to the characters. Some of the plot elements were less rather than more plausible, particularly the kidnapping sequence.I suspect that there will be a sequel and look forward to it.

John Grisham has been a favorite of mine over the years. He tells a good story and he always exposes something about the legal system. He has touched on injustices and outright crimes perpetrated by law firms, lawyers, public defenders, public prosecutors, judges and juries; bad behavior that is rampant throughout our legal system. When he fights a particular flaw in our legal system, as he does in almost every one of the novels he has written, we are not at all surprised by the revelations he offers. We know that the system can be fair and that it can be corrupt, and we suspect that it is corrupt more often than it is fair. John Grisham also likes lawyers who are loners, who work on the fringes of the system in small offices and shopping malls. His main character is often a principled lawyer who fights the system when corruption has taken over and made it difficult for folks to get justice.In his newest book, Rogue Lawyer, we meet Sebastian Rudd, a street lawyer. He does not have a stationary office. His office is in the back of a tricked out van. He defends people who no one else wants to defend because of their obvious guilt or because s/he has been declared guilty by a system that is often only too glad to jump to conclusions. The first client we meet in the book is Gardy, probably an innocent man who the system has already decided, with almost no evidence, is guilty. Sebastian (Grisham) wants Gardy to have a fair trial but in the very small town where the crime was committed a fair trial will be almost impossible. Sebastian, because feelings are running high, stays in different motel rooms at some distance from the town changing motels as often as necessary.Mr. Rudd says, “The truth is, if I had the money, the time, and the personnel, I would bribe and/or intimidate every juror. When the State, with its limitless resources, commences a fraudulent case and cheats at every turn, then cheating is legitimized. There is no level playing field. There is no fairness. The only honorable alternative for a lawyer fighting to save an innocent client is to cheat defense.However, if a defense lawyer is caught cheating, he or she gets nailed with sanctions by the court, reprimanded by the state bar association, maybe even indicted. If a prosecutor gets caught cheating, he either gets reelected or elevated to the bench. Our system never holds a bad prosecutor accountable.”And this is not the only claim Sebastian Rudd, our rogue lawyer, levels against the system. We follow him and his partner/bodyguard/driver cleverly named Partner as he tackles several interesting cases each an example of ways that people in positions of power have found to use and abuse their position to the detriment of our entire legal system. In one of his cases we have the Renfro’s, victims of a commando style police raid on the wrong house, who face jail time because the police will never admit that they were wrong in their intelligence and that their arrest procedures were drastically over-the-top. In another case he was the lawyer for a ganged up guy named Link who is on death row when he manages to escape using his guys on the outside and who now wants his lawyer, Sebastian Rudd, to pay him back all the fees he paid to the lawyer because he was not successful in his defense of Link.We have an ex-wife who is always trying to terminate Rudd’s brief visitations with his son (his job is quite dangerous). We have the MMA fighter who goes from being under Rudd’s patronage to being his client in a self-destructive moment. And although this book is short and has a lot of white space it still manages to get us involved in Sebastian Rudd’s life and to remind us of how easy it is for our legal system to go off the rails. Except for these lone fighters that John Grisham presents us with, we are given few clues about how to reform the system. Still I leave each of Grisham’s novels full of righteous anger about how the law is being twisted into something far less that the ideals the system was set up to offer.

A really great read and I was not disappointed. I recommend if you enjoy Grisham books - - it remains true to his writing style.

Grisham never disappoints

John GRISHAM is the best: he cannot write books quickly enough for me & my wife to literally devour them.And, as we live in southern Spain, getting the original english versión is only possible through Amazon...

SUPER!!!! RISPETTA LA QUALITA, LIBRO ROBUSTO SONO MOLTO CONTENTA:)

Liked the twists in the story. A no-brainer for any lover of courtroom dramas.