Review
Since
A Time to Kill published in 1989
John
Grisham has become virtually synonymous with the term "legal thriller", a genre
that he's already broken out of a few times, such as his two 2001 novels,
A
Painted House and
Skipping Christmas, but with
The Innocent Man he's crossed the line
not just from one fiction genre to another but from fiction into nonfiction.
Stylistically, it's often difficult to tell the difference between his first
nonfiction work and his novels, which is both the
strength and weakness of
The Innocent Man.
Judged against Grisham's fictional works,
The Innocent Man compares
well, his prose style is tight and fast-paced, the extremely large cast of
characters are sketched succinctly and courtroom legalities are explained in a
style simple enough for the layman to follow, and we're...
Beyond the Book
The sad tale of Ron Williamson & Dennis Fritz
Ada, Oklahoma local boy
Ron Williamson achieved hero status when drafted by baseball's Oakland
Athletics in 1971, but within a couple of seasons his baseball dreams had been
dashed and he took to drowning his sorrows in alcohol. In 1978, having
twice been charged with rape and found not guilty, and having been left by his
wife and having been in and out of mental institutions, he returned to Ada to
live with his mother, where he became known around town as a drifter. One
of his few friends was
Dennis Fritz, a high school science teacher, who was raising his 8-year-old
daughter, Elizabeth, whose mother had been murdered by a deranged neighbor six
years earlier.
In 1982, cocktail...
