The widow

Review by Booklist Review

He'd be the first to tell you that greed had a lot to do with it. When an elderly widow, Eleanor Barnett, asks Virginia lawyer Simon Latch to draw up a new will to replace a previous will drawn up by another lawyer, Simon's not especially keen. He needs big cases, money-makers. Not this small-potatoes stuff. But when Eleanor tells him she's wealthy--we're talking millions--he's suddenly very interested. He's not trying to scam her, not like that other lawyer, but Simon knows he will earn some hefty fees for probating her estate when she dies. When Eleanor winds up in the hospital after a car accident, things rapidly go from bad to worse, and soon Simon is scrambling to defend himself against a murder charge. Grisham's latest is a perfect blend of plot and character: Simon and Eleanor come across as real, flesh-and-blood people--Eleanor, especially, is beautifully, heartbreakingly depicted--and the story is full of the kind of nail-biting suspense that makes us unable to put the book down. Looks like Grisham's got another best-seller on his hands.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Grisham's zillions of fans will be intrigued as he shifts from courtroom thrillers to a mystery featuring a lawyer accused of murder.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Grisham follows up Camino's Ghosts with a captivating legal whodunit. Small-town Virginia attorney Simon Latch is in trouble: his practice is struggling, he's about to get divorced, and his gambling debts are piling up. A potential solution arrives when octogenarian widow Eleanor Barnett consults Latch about a will she's had drawn up by another lawyer. Latch quickly spots that attorney's surreptitious inclusion of a clause gifting himself almost $500,000, but when Latch learns that Barnett is a multimillionaire and has no family or friends, he sees a chance to net millions for himself by befriending her and persuading her to make him the trustee of her estate. That move comes back to haunt him when Barnett is fatally poisoned by cookies Latch bought for her, and he's put on trial for her murder. Grisham's prose is a cut above standard (Barnett drives "like a ninety-year-old who'd been a lousy driver seventy years earlier"), and his nuanced portrait of Latch demonstrates his gift for constructing morally flawed yet sympathetic characters. The author's fans will be galvanized by this impressive return to form. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Co. (Oct.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit. Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That's pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn't given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She's an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she's determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he'd never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn't mind drawing just a bit on Netty's wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she's worth, maybe even more trouble than she would've been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal. Everything you'd expect from Grisham, and this time something more. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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