John Grisham Channels Upton Sinclair in New Novel
John Grisham’s new legal thriller, The Confession, combines fiction and advocacy in a story about a Lutheran pastor and a dying ex-con who stops by a church to confess to a murder.
A Washington Post review calls the book “a superb work of social criticism in the literary troublemaker tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.” The book is a “grab-a-reader-by-the-shoulders suspense story” and a “10-fingernail-biter of a novel,” the Post says.
The review points out that Grisham has wrestled with the morality of the death penalty in his novels and in editorial pages. “The Confession bangs the gavel and issues a clear verdict,” the Post says. “As an advocacy thriller, it will rile some readers, shake up conventional pieties and, no doubt, change some minds.”
The Post’s enthusiasm isn’t shared by Bloomberg, which calls the book “didactic, predictable and dull.”
