Sycamore Row: A Book Review by John Grisham

Twenty-five real-world years after John Grisham’s first novel, Grisham takes us back to Clanton in Ford County, Mississippi.

Three book years after Jake Brigance successfully defended a black man accused of murdering the two white men that raped and killed his daughter in A Time to Kill, Grisham renews his story of Jake and Judge Attlee. We slide back into Clanton as if we never left. Once again, we feel the racial tensions that abound in this small southern town.

The Tribulations of Sycamore Row

Sycamore Row gets its name from a stand of sycamore trees. One of which was used by Seth Hubbard, a millionaire who had late-stage lung cancer, to hang himself.

The day prior, he made a new will, a hand-written will that left the bulk of his estate to his maid, Lettie Lang, who nursed him through his final days on earth. He also bequeathed five percent to his church and five percent to his brother, whom he hadn’t seen in years and wasn’t sure was still alive. This hand-written will would over-ride the will he had drawn up by a law firm two years earlier.

What makes this story interesting is that the new will was legal in Mississippi. Probate law requires he had the mental capacity to write it and there was no undue tampering from anyone named in the will.

Seth hated lawyers and had a healthy distrust for all but Jake Brigance, whom he wrote a letter to and requested he protect his new will at all costs.

Since Seth Hubbard was worth somewhere in the neighborhood of 24 million dollars, everybody wanted a piece of his estate.

In his first will, Seth’s children, Herschel and Ramona were named as the primary recipients of his estate. Herschel and Ramona were deadbeats according to their father that rarely came to see him unless they needed something.

They, of course, hired lawyers to protect their interests. Their primary purpose was to raise a bit of doubt in the jury’s mind — both, to the mental capacity of Hubbard and the relationship between him and Lettie.

Lettie, whose husband cared more for drinking than he did working, had a son in prison, and a daughter recently returned from the military.

Lettie’s supposed friends and dubious relatives came out of the woodwork to help her stake her claim to the money. They hoped she would reward them monetarily after she received her reward.

And, the trial

Grisham takes us through the tedious and mundane process of establishing the estate's worth, jury selection, and trial procedures. After all, not everything about a trial is action and adventure.

But, the events outside the courtroom, such as Lettie’s husband’s arrest for driving under the influence and vehicular homicide add to the tale. There’s also Lucien’s search for Seth’s brother, a merchant marine with drug and alcohol abuse problems. The search for Lettie’s birth parents, since she is an orphan, and the racially charged events in the town where the trial takes place keeps the story moving at a fast clip.

Grisham is a master storyteller who knows his way around a courtroom. He has shown that ability time and time again in his other books. However, in Sycamore Row, as in A Time to Kill, he showed us his ability to pull us into the small town of Clanton, which is the Deep South. Grisham’s tale holds us spellbound until the final verdict.

Buy it for your Kindle: https://amzn.to/2ZFBhns

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Steve Dalton is a writer, blogger, book reader & reviewer. Web content for Home, About Us, Contact Us, and Blog pages on your website are only an email away. Steve is a retired US Army First Sergeant with a degree in journalism from the University of Maryland and a Certified US English Chicago Manual of Style Editor. He provides a discount for Veterans, First Responders, & students.

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