Author: John Grisham
Year published: 2025
Category: Adult fiction (mystery)
Pages: 416 pages
Rating: 4 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA (VA, PA)
Summary: 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….
Review: Picking up a Grisham novel is such a comfort experience for me. I know what the writing will be like, the general genre/theme of the story, etc. And I always enjoy them. This one was no exception.
The Widow is a bit different from Grisham's other lawyer novels in that the lawyer ends up on trial. There is a slow build to the accusation, which I liked because it meant that I really got to know Simon and his surrounding characters before the "action" started. We know Simon's family, their domestic troubles, his secretary, his gambling colleagues. He is by no means a perfect "good" guy. Simon has addictions; he is a bit sketchy in his legal dealings, and I think that's good. He is someone "normal" with whom the reader can sympathize.
I always enjoy a courtroom drama, and Grisham is really good at them. This novel has the trial smack in the middle with an investigation after it. I got three good parts in this novel: the build-up, the trials, and the investigation. Very satisfying.
Challenges for which this counts: none
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