Book info

• Title The Runaway Jury
• Author John Grisham
• Year 1996
• Genre Thriller

In Biloxi, Mississippi, a landmark trial against a tobacco company begins. There are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake and soon it swerves mysteriously off course. The jury is behaving strangely, and at least one juror is convinced he's being watched. Soon they have to be sequestered. Then a tip from an anonymous young woman suggests she is able to predict the jurors' increasingly odd behaviour. Someone has a plan. But who? And, more importantly, what do they want?

Thoughts

This was such an odd read. It’s a reliably good legal thriller from John Grisham, but the structure of it is a little different. There doesn’t really seem to be a protagonist, just all the various parties of a particularly odious trial, and everyone behaving quite badly. That makes it a little bit difficult to get fully invested in the story, to have someone to latch on to and root for.

But on the flip side to that, it’s enormously readable, dipping in and out of the trial and only going into detail on the important bits. So I really enjoyed it, even though I was never quite sure where I, or anybody else, stood!

Rating: 4 / 5