The Judge’s List by John Grisham: book review

The Judge’s List (2021) is set in Florida, America.

Investigator Lacy Stolze of the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct works to assess complaints against sitting judges. But she has never received a complaint like this one. Usually, she investigates bribes and corruption.

Jeri Crosby’s father was murdured in 1992. For 22 years, she has been trying to find her father’s killer. She knows it was a sitting judge, but she needs proof.

Proof is nearly impossible. This judge is patient, calculating, careful, evasive, and cunning. He is brilliant at erasing all evidence and remaining unknown as a suspect.

The judge has great patience and he is a serial killer – ‘he had waited five years to kill her father, nine to kill the reporter, twenty-two to kill Kronke, and approximately fourteen to kill his scoutmaster.’ Jeri is patient too. Now she needs the help of Lacy Stolze and the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct.

The judge hasn’t finished killing. He has more people on his list.

In this legal thriller, Lacy investigates the judge to prove his involvement in the murder of Jeri’s father, but she must ensure that the members of her legal team, and Jeri the claimant, are not on the judge’s list.

This is a page-turner from the beginning. Hard to put down, I had to finish it in one sitting. This is a suspenseful, cat-and-mouse game with intelligent, tight writing that grips readers by the throat. I’m speechless.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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