Crime: John Grisham has made his name primarily on the strength of his storytelling. Whatever criticisms one might level against him - cardboard characters, stilted dialogue, lack of dramatic depth - one could never say that he does not tell a rip-roaring good story.
Then, a couple of years ago, he wrote A Painted House, which turned out to be a beautifully evocative account of a young boy's growing up in the American south. This book was character-driven, rather than relying on its storytelling, and now, in The Last Juror, he has returned to his own native Mississippi to pen a somewhat similarly themed novel. On the surface a tale of murder and violence, with a horrendous rape and killing at its centre, the forward thrust of the book is much more taken up with the people who feature than with the tale it tells. The setting is the town of Clanton in Ford County and the first-person narrator is 23-year-old Willie Traynor, a blow-in from Memphis who has taken over the local paper.
When Danny Padgitt rapes and kills a local widow in front of her two young children, the trial that follows becomes a nine-day wonder. A notorious raggle-taggle of ruthless characters, the Padgitt family lives on an island in the swamps, from where it carries on its illicit businesses safe from the law.
However, an honest judge and the weight of public opinion combine to convict the perpetrator of the crime and he is sentenced to life imprisonment.
Life imprisonment means that he is released after eight years and, when he returns, the jurors who convicted him begin to fall like ninepins.
One of these jurors is an indomitable black woman named Callie Ruffin, and it is she and her family who figure most prominently in the story.
But there are many other larger than life characters in the opulent tapestry painted by Grisham, in a novel that is much richer in texture than his normal offering. And when it reaches the screen, as it certainly must, there are a number of meaty parts in it for the Gene Hackmans of this world.
• Vincent Banville's last thriller was Cannon Law