‘The hell you doin’ up?” he snarled as he tried to close the door behind him.Īs calmly as possible, Josie said, “Just waitin’ on you, dear. But if there had been no fights he often came home looking for a brawl. He liked to fight in the honky-tonks, and after a rough night he usually licked his wounds and went straight to bed. His face had no cuts or bruises, perhaps a good sign, perhaps not. At thirty-four, he was graying and balding and tried to cover it up with a bad comb-over, which after a night of bar-hopping left long strands of hair hanging below his ears. His pale Irish skin turned red, his cheeks were crimson, and his eyes glowed with a whiskey-lit fire that she had seen too many times. Here’s an excerpt from that old man writer’s new novel:

At the time, I didn’t care about cliches and one-dimensional characters, and even if I did, John Grisham was a new writer who had succeeded because of grit (if you believed those 1990s stories about Grisham), so his flaws could be overlooked. I say “might be” because I at least finished A Time to Kill when I read it in the 1990s. Whether or not you think A Time to Kill was any good, A Time for Mercy might be even worse. To Kill A Mockingbird) that A Time to Kill was successful only because it was released right after The Firm hit it big.

I’ve always thought (and you can read more at A Time To Kill vs. Who the heck is Jake Brigance? Oh yeah, Jake Brigance was the lawyer in Grisham’s early bestseller A Time to Kill.

A Time for Mercy by John Grisham is being branded as the third Jake Brigance book.