guardian book reviews 2019

• Best books of 2020

A teenager’s nature diary, the race for a vaccine and the return of Lyra ... books have been vital in getting us through the year. Guardian critics pick 2020’s best fiction, poetry, politics, science and more

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Hilary Mantel, Ali Smith and Tsitsi Dangarembga completed landmark series, Martin Amis turned to autofiction and Elena Ferrante returned to Naples – Justine Jordan picks the best novels of the year, including a host of brilliant debuts.

Read the whole list: Best fiction of 2020

Children’s books

Imogen Russell Williams on an excellent wintry fantasy, a pair of young detectives, the return of Lyra and Pan - plus picture books and poetry for everyone.

Read the whole list: Best children’s books of 2020

Crime and thrillers

From hard-hitting debuts and gritty mysteries, to a cosy caper and a swashbuckling maritime puzzle, Laura Wilson picks the best crime and thrillers by the likes of Tana French, Stuart Turton, Rumaan Alam and more.

Read the whole list: Best crime and thrillers of 2020

Science fiction and fantasy

From Kim Stanley Robinson to Diane Cook, Adam Roberts considers a year where visions of a climate emergency-ravaged near future came to the fore.

Read the whole list: Best scifi and fantasy of 2020

Memoir and celebrity books

Fiona Sturges selects the best memoirs, including Caitlin Moran, Raynor Winn and Deborah Orr, as well as searing revelations and sparkling anecdotes from Mariah Carey, Matthew McConaughey and Michael J Fox

Read the whole list: Best memoirs and celebrity books of 2020

Gaby Hinsliff picks the best books about politics and politicians, including biographies exposing the inner demons of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, some quality David Cameron gossip – and why Germans do it better.

Read the whole list: Best politics books of 2020

How to succeed at failing, guides to anti-racism work, a fun journey towards the apocalypse, and human nature – good or bad? Steve Poole shares the best books about big ideas.

Read the whole list: Best ideas books of 2020

Huw Richards picks a clear-eyed look at grassroots football, hard-hitting memoirs from a world champion kickboxer and a leading female rugby player, and more.

Read the whole list: Best sports books of 2020

Nature and science

Katy Guest looks at the books published in a year where science became big news: guides to dealing with future pandemics, the human side to Stephen Hawking and a data-led argument for global women’s empowerment. And Patrick Barkham picks five remarkable nature books, including teenager Dara McAnulty and the follow-up to Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’ The Lost Words.

Read the whole list: Best science books and best nature books of 2020

Rishi Dastidar marks a year of excellent collections, including Clive James’s joyous farewell, sounds of the city from Caleb Femi, and outstanding debuts from Will Harris and Rachel Long.

Read the whole list: Best poetry collections of 2020

Comics and graphic novels

An award-winning tale of rival ice-cream sellers, a migrant Syrian family’s experiences of the US and a superhero in drag are just some of the highlights selected by James Smart .

Read the whole list: Best comics and graphic novels of 2020

Kathryn Hughes picks titles about Andy Warhol, Artemisia Gentileschi and Lucian Freud, plus a clear-eyed view of London’s changing landscape.

Read the whole list: Best art books of 2020

Mouthwatering pastries, simple one‑tin bakes, a new Ottolenghi and a rapturous account by Nigella … Meera Sodha shares the best recipes and food writing to transport you around the world.

Read the whole list: Best cookbooks and food writing of 2020

Stocking fillers

Justine Jordan selects five little treasures to liven up your festive giving, including a history of Essex girls and the new David Sedaris collection.

Read the whole list: Best gift books of 2020

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The 10 Best Books of 2019

The editors of The Times Book Review choose the best fiction and nonfiction titles this year.

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Disappearing Earth

By julia phillips.

In the first chapter of this assured debut novel, two young girls vanish, sending shock waves through a town perched on the edge of the remote, brooding Kamchatka Peninsula. What follows is a novel of overlapping short stories about the various women who have been affected by their disappearance. Each richly textured tale pushes the narrative forward another month and exposes the ways in which the women of Kamchatka have been shattered — personally, culturally and emotionally — by the crime.

Fiction | Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95. | Read the review | Listen: Julia Phillips on the podcast

The Topeka School

By ben lerner.

Lerner’s exhilarating third novel, after “Leaving the Atocha Station” and “10:04,” rocks an emphatically American amplitude, ranging freely from parenthood to childhood, from toxic masculinity to the niceties of cunnilingus, from Freud’s Oedipus complex to Tupac’s “All Eyez on Me.” Adam Gordon returns as the protagonist, but this time as a high school debate star, and mostly in the third person. Equal portions of the book are given over to the voices of his psychologist parents, and to a former classmate whose cognitive deficits are the inverse of Adam’s gifts. The earlier novels’ questions about art and authenticity persist; but Adam’s faithlessness is now stretched into a symptom of a national crisis of belief. Lerner’s own arsenal has always included a composer’s feel for orchestration, a ventriloquist’s vocal range and a fine ethnographic attunement. Never before, though, has the latter been so joyously indulged, or the bubblicious texture of late Clintonism been so lovingly evoked.

Fiction | Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27. | Read the review

By Ted Chiang

Many of the nine deeply beautiful stories in this collection explore the material consequences of time travel. Reading them feels like sitting at dinner with a friend who explains scientific theory to you without an ounce of condescension. Each thoughtful, elegantly crafted story poses a philosophical question; Chiang curates all nine into a conversation that comes full circle, after having traversed remarkable terrain.

Fiction | Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95. | Read the review | Listen: Ted Chiang on the podcast

Lost Children Archive

By valeria luiselli.

The Mexican author’s third novel — her first to be written in English — unfolds against a backdrop of crisis: of children crossing borders, facing death, being detained, being deported unaccompanied by their guardians. The novel centers on a couple and their two children (all unnamed), who are taking a road trip from New York City to the Mexican border; the couple’s marriage is on the brink of collapse as they pursue independent ethnographic research projects and the woman tries to help a Mexican immigrant find her daughters, who’ve gone missing in their attempt to cross the border behind her. The brilliance of Luiselli’s writing stirs rage and pity, but what might one do after reading such a novel? Acutely sensitive to these misgivings, Luiselli has delivered a madly allusive, self-reflexive, experimental book, one that is as much about storytellers and storytelling as it is about lost children.

Fiction | Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95. | Read the review | Read our profile of Luiselli

Night Boat to Tangier

By kevin barry.

A desolate ferry terminal on the Spanish coast isn’t a place where you’d expect to encounter sharp-edged lyricism or rueful philosophy, but thanks to the two Irish gangster antiheroes of Barry’s novel, there’s plenty of both on display, along with scabrously amusing tale-telling and much summoning of painful memories. Their lives have become so intertwined that the young woman whose arrival they await can qualify as family for either man. Will she show? How much do they care? Their banter is a shield against the dark, a witty new take on “Waiting for Godot.”

Fiction | Doubleday. $25.95. | Read the review | Listen: Kevin Barry on the podcast

[ Best books of the past decade: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 ]

Say Nothing

By patrick radden keefe.

Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book — as finely paced as a novel — Keefe uses McConville’s murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga.

Nonfiction | Doubleday. $28.95. | Read the review

By Leo Damrosch

The English painter Joshua Reynolds just wanted to cheer up his friend Samuel Johnson, who was feeling blue. Who knew that the Friday night gab sessions he proposed they convene at London’s Turk’s Head Tavern would end up attracting virtually all the leading lights of late-18th-century Britain? Damrosch brings the Club’s redoubtable personalities — the brilliant minds, the jousting wits, the tender camaraderie — to vivid life, delivering indelible portraits of Johnson and Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, the actor David Garrick, the historian Edward Gibbon and, of course, Johnson’s loyal biographer James Boswell: “a constellation of talent that has rarely if ever been equaled.”

Nonfiction | Yale University Press. $30. | Read the review

The Yellow House

By sarah m. broom.

In her extraordinary, engrossing debut, Broom pushes past the baseline expectations of memoir to create an entertaining and inventive amalgamation of literary forms. Part oral history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life, “The Yellow House” is a full indictment of the greed, discrimination, indifference and poor city planning that led her family’s home to be wiped off the map. Tracing the history of a single home in New Orleans East (an area “50 times the size of the French Quarter,” yet nowhere to be found on most tourist maps, comprising scraps of real estate whites have passed over), from the ’60s to Hurricane Katrina, this is an instantly essential text, examining the past, present and possible future of the city of New Orleans, and of America writ large.

Nonfiction | Grove Press. $26. | Read the review | Listen: Sarah M. Broom on the podcast

No Visible Bruises

By rachel louise snyder.

Snyder’s thoroughly reported book covers what the World Health Organization has called “a global health problem of epidemic proportions.” In America alone, more than half of all murdered women are killed by a current or former partner; domestic violence cuts across lines of class, religion and race. Snyder debunks pervasive myths (restraining orders are the answer, abusers never change) and writes movingly about the lives (and deaths) of people on both sides of the equation. She doesn’t give easy answers but presents a wealth of information that is its own form of hope.

Nonfiction | Bloomsbury Publishing. $28. | Read the review | Listen: Rachel Louise Snyder on the podcast

Midnight in Chernobyl

By adam higginbotham.

Higginbotham’s superb account of the April 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is one of those rare books about science and technology that read like a tension-filled thriller. Replete with vivid detail and sharply etched personalities, this narrative of astounding incompetence moves from mistake to mistake, miscalculation to miscalculation, as it builds to the inevitable, history-changing disaster.

Nonfiction | Simon & Schuster. $29.95. | Read the review | Listen: Adam Higginbotham on the podcast

[ Want more? Learn how the editors put together this year’s list . ]

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An earlier version of this article misstated the setting of Ben Lerner's "10:04." It is set primarily in New York, not Europe.

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clock This article was published more than  4 years ago

What is left to say about a new John Grisham novel? ‘The Guardians’ has something to add.

What is there left to say about a new John Grisham novel?

Maybe only that Grisham has done it again.

“The Guardians” is Grisham’s 40th novel; he’s now 64 and has been writing suspense novels pretty much nonstop since “A Time to Kill” was published in 1989. Most of his novels are legal thrillers, but Grisham has also branched out into stories about rare books, sports and medicine. (His 2015 e-book, “The Tumor,” is about an experimental cancer treatment called focused ultrasound technology that Grisham champions.) Grisham has even written a YA legal series featuring a 13-year-old amateur legal eagle named “Theodore Boone.”

Such creative longevity is not that unusual in the suspense genre, but what is rare is Grisham’s feat of keeping up the pace of producing, on average, a novel a year (in 2017 he published two) without a notable diminishment of ingenuity or literary quality. Dame Agatha Christie, who barely paused between books to sharpen pencils during her near-50-year marathon mystery career, is another such marvel.

What John Grisham gets right about lawyers and the law

Which brings us to “The Guardians,” Grisham’s latest terrific novel. Grisham’s main character here is a so-called “innocence lawyer,” a workaholic attorney-and-Episcopal-priest named Cullen Post. Post has trimmed his life down to the barest of essentials, living in spartan quarters above the nonprofit Guardian Ministries, his workplace in Savannah, Ga. The book focuses on Post’s investigation into the wrongful conviction of a black man named Quincy Miller who was set up to take the fall for the murder of a white lawyer in a small Florida town some 22 years before the opening of this story. (In his life away from his writing desk, Grisham serves on the board of directors of The Innocence Project.)

Post’s efforts to ferret out exculpatory evidence in this cold case put him in grave danger because, for one thing, the shadowy drug cartel responsible for the murder has been known to hold grisly parties in isolated jungle locales south of the border. In the dead center of this novel, Post hears a cautionary tale from a traumatized survivor of one of these gatherings. This account calls upon Grisham to summon up his heretofore unrealized inner Caligula.

In an affecting backstory, Post recalls his early career as a public defender; but the grotesque contradictions of that job — particularly Post’s final assignment to defend a depraved teenage rapist and murderer — brought on a nervous breakdown. After a sincere “come-to-Jesus” moment during his recovery, Post was ordained and began serving with a prison ministry, which led him to innocence work and eventually Guardian Ministries. A trim four-person operation, Guardian Ministries consists of Post; an underpaid litigator who’s a single mother of boys; an exoneree named Frankie who’s turned private investigator; and the nonprofit’s founder, a former business executive who, similar to Post, had a conversion experience and dedicated her life to righting wrongs of the criminal justice system.

That said, “The Guardians” is nuanced in its moral vision: Post acknowledges that most of the prisoners who contact him alleging wrongful convictions are, in fact, guilty; but it’s the thousands of others who have become his vocation. “It’s fairly easy to convict an innocent man and virtually impossible to exonerate one,” Post reminds a potential client. So far, the team has exonerated eight prisoners.

Quincy Miller may just become the ninth. His fate will depend on a relentless re-investigation conducted by Post and his colleagues and some strong-arming of jailhouse snitches and other witnesses who gave false testimony years ago. The lawyer Quincy was convicted of killing turns out to have had ties to a drug cartel. So, too, does the now-retired sheriff who was in charge of the investigation 22 years ago. Post knows he’ll eventually have to visit the secluded scene of the crime, Seabrook, Fla., but he wisely hesitates. Thinking out loud with a colleague, Post says: “Our clients are in prison because someone else pulled the trigger. They’re still out here, laughing because the cops nailed the wrong guy. The last thing they want is an innocence lawyer digging through the cold case.”

In his titanic efforts to turn justice denied for Miller into justice delayed, Post courts danger both human and supernatural. The climax of “The Guardian” slyly nods to many a classic Nancy Drew ad­ven­ture: Post and Frankie steel themselves to break into a boarded-up haunted house, climb up into its dank attic and unearth (as Nancy would say) a “clew” that just may decide Miller’s fate — all before the drug gang gets wind of their location. Post is a driven and likable loner whom, I hope, Grisham will bring back in future novels. After all, as “The Guardians” makes clear, there’s plenty of work left for an innocence lawyer to do.

Maureen Corrigan , who is the book critic of the NPR program, “Fresh Air,” teaches literature at Georgetown University.

THE GUARDIANS

By John Grisham

Doubleday. 384 pp. $29.95

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Weekend: episode one of a new podcast

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What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in March

Authors, critics and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

Francesca Specter, author and journalist

I was lucky enough to be sent an early copy of David Nicholls’ forthcoming novel, You Are Here , a publication well-timed for those who adored the recent One Day Netflix adaptation . Nicholls’ latest book has long been on my radar, as I’ve written extensively about its central themes of solitude and loneliness.

You Are Here’s lovers, Marnie and Michael, are aged 38 and 42, out of the heat of wedding-and-baby season yet far from later life. This meant a refreshing absence of typical romcom tropes (eg proposals, weddings, a birth). Instead, the plot is framed around a coast-to-coast walk, while dramatic tension is created by the spectre of an estranged wife. The romance has sincerity and authenticity, notably in a river wrestling scene where one party is wearing zip-away waterproof shorts/trousers. There were echoes of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy , another book I loved.

For my neighbourhood book club, I read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea , a feminist, postcolonial prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Antoinette Cosway, Mr Rochester’s “madwoman in the attic” first wife (whom he renames Bertha), is a powerful narrator with timeless resonance: “There are more ways than one of being happy, better perhaps to be peaceful and contented and protected.” It made me rethink the romanticisation of Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester (last January, we read Wuthering Heights … same story with Heathcliff).

While I’ve never loved the short story medium, a friend convinced me that Alice Munro’s Runaway would be the exception. He was right. The Nobel prize-winning author’s prose is pithy with unforgettable details, like a lost goat’s reappearance amid the celestial halo of a car headlight. I enjoyed how several characters reappear across stories, too, like encountering an old friend.

Helen, Guardian reader

I have been reading Other Women by Emma Flint , a crime novel that is based on the real-life murder of Emily Beilby Kaye by her married lover in the 1920s. It is beautifully written, but harrowing and full of tension. Kaye is reimagined as Beatrice, a woman who falls in love with a colleague, having been “left over” after the first world war – she was what was considered to be marriageable age when most eligible men were away at war. It was interesting to read about a character based on such women, who strived to make a life and career and were almost invisible in society.

Alba Arikha, author

It’s been 10 years since Michael Cunningham wrote a book and, being a fan, I awaited his most recent one, Day , with trepidation. Over three consecutive Aprils, from 2019 to 2021, we follow a Brooklyn family during and after the onset of Covid. Just like in his other work, there is something haunting about Cunningham’s writing. It makes one acutely aware of the imperceptible fragility of life: the way we speak to each other, who we are, and what we make of it. The book is a powerful example of dysfunctionality, and what happens when cues are missed or ignored. But it’s also about desire, the spaces we attempt to inhabit and escape from, not always successfully.

Because I’ve always wanted to read him, and in preparation for a writing class I’ll be teaching this summer in Greece, I dived into a collection of Isaac Babel’s short stories, Of Sunshine and Bedbugs . I found myself airlifted 100 years back into the ebullient, rich and colourful port city of Odessa, in the company of Jewish thugs, sex workers, cart drivers, milkmaids and rabbis. Though pogroms loom in the background, humour and irreverence preside.

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I began reading How to Make a Bomb by Rupert Thomson on a flight from London to NYC and finished it just before landing. The midlife crisis of Philip, a history professor, and his decision to “dispense with structure, and open himself to possibility and chance” is completely gripping. There are no full stops in this beautifully written novel, and as a result, the fragmentary rhythm catapults one breathlessly forwards.

For nearly two decades, Ann Wroe has written obituaries for the Economist. I remember my late mother mentioning her with quiet admiration. Which is one of the reasons why I picked up her book Lifescapes . And I found that same quietude rustling through the pages, alternating between prose, poetry, memoir and biography. “The smallest things may offer vital clues,” Wroe writes of her obituaries, which she calls “catching souls”. Chronologies do not interest her. But those clues, from objects to images, strangers to ghosts, the sacredness in blood to the sound of snow, do. There is a magical quality to her unusual, almost ethereal writing. A soul catcher she is and I’m still thinking about it.

Two Hours by Alba Arikha is published by Eris (£1 4.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

Rupert, Guardian reader

As a teenager in the 60s I followed Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s relationship along with the rest of the world. Now I have had the chance to revisit the subject again, by reading Erotic Vagrancy by Roger Lewis , a fascinating double biography that delves deeper into the lives of that (in)famous couple and all of the people who surrounded them. There is a relentless, almost obsessive quality to Lewis’s writing that had me reading well into the night. I highly recommended this book.

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Review: Grisham’s ‘The Guardians’ is a suspenseful thriller

The prolific writer's latest novel explores the world of defense attorneys working for little pay and prestige to help innocent people who are incarcerated.

The Guardians

By John Grisham

Doubleday. 384 pp. $29.95

Reviewed by Jeff Ayers

In John Grisham’s latest novel, The Guardians , a former priest named Cullen Post works for an organization called Guardian Ministries that scours court transcripts and personal letters from convicts to determine if someone is wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he or she didn’t commit. If the organization believes without a doubt that the potential client is innocent, it will do everything it can within the boundaries of the law to free an innocent person, investigating and pushing for a new trial.

Quincy Miller has been in prison for 22 years — and still claims his innocence. A young lawyer was murdered, and suspicion quickly turned to Miller pulling the trigger. He says a fellow inmate fabricated a story about Miller confessing, and his ex-wife claimed that he owned several guns, which also wasn’t true. Another witness lied about seeing him flee the scene. Miller swears he never owned a gun, wasn’t anywhere in the area that night, and that a key piece of evidence that later disappeared was planted.

It’s a bit much to believe that so many people would be involved in a miscarriage of justice, but Post believes Miller and begins to dig into what happened that fateful night.

Grisham again delivers a suspenseful thriller, this one touching on false incarceration, the death penalty, and how the legal system shows prejudice. The team of characters is first-rate, and Miller’s attitude and mannerisms will have readers questioning what truth means in the world of the legal system.

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The Guardians (2019)

A legal thriller that oversimplifies its subject matter; low on actual thrills and high on racial muckraking..

• Author: John Grisham
• Publisher: Doubleday
• ISBN: 978-0385544184
• Release Date: October 15, 2019

The Guardians may not be the worst John Grisham novel, but it’s certainly the worst of John Grisham. Honest fans will recognize many of the author’s trademarks sprinkled throughout this fictionalized tale of exonerating wrongly convicted men, and will accept his oversimplification of the judicial system as long as there’s a rousing adventure among the legalese.

Cullen Post is a 48 year-old lawyer who also happens to be an Episcopal priest, though the clerical collar he sometimes wears is more costume than creed, realizing the manipulative effect is has on people. Fed up with being just another criminal defense attorney, he’s since dedicated his life to passionately advocating on behalf of those he believes the system has failed. Already pessimistic about his profession, Post isn’t above bending limits in the pursuit of justice. “We, the good guys, often find that getting our hands dirty is the only way to save our clients.” Cue the collar.

To accomplish this he works for Guardian Ministries, a nonprofit legal defense outfit with a mandate straight from heaven itself. “Jesus said to remember the prisoners,” says founder Vicki Gourley, and so shall Guardian Ministries. Assisting him is Francois “Frankie” Tatum, their first client and first exoneree, freed after serving 14 years of a life sentence. Those years didn’t go to waste, however; while imprisoned he absorbed legal knowledge like a sponge, and once freed became an indispensable part of the Guardian Ministries team. As a black man navigating the South’s seedier elements Frankie is able to blend in more readily than a white man with the best intentions ever could.

The way the narrative follows Cullen Post hopping from one client to the next, each convicted of very different and heinous crimes, almost feels episodic by design, as if Grisham is laying the foundation for a streaming series or whatever Amazon or Hulu calls them now. I don’t blame him; take a look at the glut of new Stephen King and Micheal Connelly adaptations and remember that Grisham once ruled Hollywood’s box-office – why not snag a miniseries while the iron is hot?

But the real focus concerns one Quincy Miller, a black man that’s been in prison for 22 years for the murder of Keith Russo, the lawyer who had previously handled Quincy’s nasty divorce. The settlement didn’t please Quincy, whose paychecks were devoured by child support and alimony garnishments. Events soon spiraled out of control and Quincy’s life would take one wrong turn after another, with Russo’s widow alleging he’d stop by the office and threaten the lawyer he felt ruined his life.

A quick glance at the so-called “evidence” would show a heavily stacked deck against the defendant. The alleged murder weapon – a 12-gauge shotgun – was never recovered. A blood-splattered flashlight found in the trunk of Quincy’s car led a forensic expert to testify the “blood” speckles were evidence it was used in the crime, despite the fact he’d never personally examined the flashlight, his analysis based solely on viewing color photos. Worse, the flashlight itself went missing months before the trial even started.

The only real “evidence” given at Quincy’s trial was testimony from his estranged ex-wife, who claimed to see him race from the scene and, more damning, that she believed Quincy owned a shotgun. The final injustice: the trial took place in a county with a 83 percent white population – with just a single black person sitting on a jury of his “peers”. By all accounts, he never stood a chance.

Longtime Grisham fans can expect most of the usual twists and turns to help turn what might have been a mundane tale of redemption (for both lawyer and client) into something far more theatrical and – allegedly – thrilling. There’s just one problem: there’s very few “thrills” to be had in this legal thriller, and the legal work itself becomes highly questionable as well.

I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t read it, but there’s no tension, no drama, no sense that anything (or anyone) is ever really at risk, only that Cullen Post’s “faith” in his abilities to help free a wrongly convicted man will be enough to overcome whatever obstacles his team face on their crusade. Worse, whatever slight tension is present early on quickly fades as the narrative transitions from first-person reportage to a dull investigation around the cartel and crocodiles. The any story involving the death penalty, cartels and crocodiles could be so tedious is actually quite impressive.

In the Author’s Notes section Grisham shares what inspired him to write The Guardians, which is (very loosely) based on the real-life case of Texas inmate Joe Bryan, a 78-year-old who’s spent the last thirty years in prison after being convicted of murdering his wife, Mickey Bryan. Many of the details of his case mimic those in Grisham’s story, the most egregious being testimony about blood splatters evidence his defenders – and even the prosecution’s own expert forensic witness – now call “junk” evidence.

It’s a harrowing case from which few easy conclusions can  – should – be drawn. But that hasn’t stopped Grisham from appropriating another “real” case for his novel, adding layers of racial muckraking that feel exploitative and manipulative, even in the service of the greater good.

I guarantee – even going so far as to place a sucker’s bet – that lazier reviewers for this book will cite Grisham’s timeliness and call to action for legal reform, slavishly gushing over how this story – while fictional – puts a necessary spotlight on systemic injustice minorities face in this country. There’s some truth to this, clearly, and having one of the world’s most popular authors support the cause is a noble and noteworthy thing.

However, exoneration and successful appeals for post-conviction relief are rarely, forgive me, as legally and morally black and white as social justice advocates (and novelists) would have you believe. Too often the face of judicial injustice is a black one, outrageous sentences and erasure of due process affecting African-American defendants disproportionately from white defendants serve as shameful holdovers from a darker, best forgotten time. Joe Bryan, who is unmistakably white, has his real story transposed onto a black and entirely fictional doppelganger, almost as if Grisham felt his case wouldn’t stir enough outrage on its own. Not only is this gross, it’s actually racist.

The lackadaisical way Grisham reduces the complexity of a real cases into such easily digestible, straightforward bites is almost comically simple. Not once, but twice do we listen to sorrowful judges apologizing to wrongly convicted men in nearly identical speeches. Talk of finding the real killers or the impact of survivors is quickly and hastily brushed off, lest they remind the already convinced that “freeing” the convicted isn’t always about proving innocence, or about innocence at all sometimes. “Wrongly convicted” and “innocent” can be very different things, though you’d never consider that reading The Guardians.

Quincy’s innocence is never in doubt, the charges against him so overwhelmingly lopsided that readers with delicate sensibilities will never face the moral conundrum of having to *gasp* even consider that he may have been justly convicted. His eventual exoneration – less surprising than an episode of Matlock – allows Grisham to present readers a kind of narrative test case to make them sympathetic without that unpleasantness of objectivity.

At the heart and center of The Guardians is really Grisham championing a cause worth championing – particularly the work done by organizations such as The Innocence Project to help exonerate and free wrongly imprisoned (and innocent) men and women, many who have spent decades behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit. Another real-life inspiration for The Guardians is Centurion Ministries; Grisham suggests sending them a few bucks – and I agree. Save your money and send it to them instead.

The Exchange: After The Firm (2023)

The boys from biloxi (2022), sparring partners (2022), the judge’s list (2021), sooley (2021), a time for mercy (2020), sex and vanity (2020), camino winds (2020).