** spoiler alert ** A young black girl is raped by two rednecks in Mississippi. She survives and is able to identify the two men. Before their trial begins, the girl’s daddy shows up at the court and mows them down with an M16. Now the black dad is on trial for his life, and attorney Jake Brigantz (the archetype of all Grisham lawyers to come in future novels – young, cocky, inexperienced lawyer takes on an evil entity, in this case racism) has taken on the case in order to keep the well-meaning father off death row.

At the heart of the novel is the question, “Would you convict a man for killing the men that raped and beat his daughter?” Grisham effectively sets the stage for a theme of conditional morality that carries really well throughout the book. At every plot point, someone is facing a morally ambiguous decision that affects the lives of other people. Many of them have no problem bending the rules, or being downright unethical. Our hero, Brigantz, seems to have the most difficult decisions to make, as his decisions affect more people than anyone else. He doesn’t spend a lot of time considering whether his decisions are right, but he certainly suffers the consequences of the decisions he makes.

As in his other novels that I’ve read, Grisham does the morality tale well within the confines of the legal system. He shows how our legal system, theoretically our most fair and objective institution, is full of gaping holes that are not easily fixed. It’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma (no pun intended) wherein one must be willing to sink to the lowest ethical rung of the opposition in order to have a chance of winning. A system of justice that is supposed to be based on a judgment of the facts instead hinges on so much more.

This was Grisham’s first novel, and it shows in a lot of ways (and not all of them are bad).

For one thing, the story is way too long. Grisham drags the reader through every painstaking point in the legal process, even those moments which have little or no impact at all on the case or the story at large. Subplots are carried for three quarters of the book, only to be conveniently discarded near the end.

As for the characters, Jake Brigantz is too good to be real. I don’t know much about being a lawyer, but I’m willing to bet that it is nearly impossible to run a successful law practice with just yourself and a secretary, and even less plausible that one could take this bare bones practice and defend one of the biggest capital murder cases in state history with just the help of a couple of lawyer friends and a gorgeous stranger that literally just shows up at the front door.

Luckily, Grisham’s brush with sex scenes are brief, because they’re almost too embarrassing too read, like a horny fourteen-year-old boy’s idea of sex. Every time Jake’s wife is on the page, Grisham never fails to mention her ‘bronze’ legs and arms, and in one paragraph mentions ‘bronze legs’ at least three times.

There are many plot holes and inconsistencies, though many are forgivable for the sake of the story. Fortunately, the court scenes are rather short, and the story is propelled by everything happening around the trial. The end is satisfactory enough, and I think it’s the right ending for this story.

A Time to Kill is a story of competing interests, and in the end no one is truly a good person. The fun is trying to figure out one’s own position amongst the many presented in the story, and thankfully there are few easy answers.