Quite a good book but found it plodding in parts. Not one of his best.

Back Cover Blurb:
This Grisham novel is about a rookie lawyer engaged in defending a member of the Ku Klux Klan who is being held on Death Row. The lawyer detests his client's racism, but as the case develops, it appears that his client may be innocent. ( )

2625 The Chamber, by John Grisham (read 10 Jul 1994) This tells of Adam Hall, just out of Michigan Law School. He tries to save the life of Sam Cayhall, his grandfather, who was with a killer who set up a bomb that blew up the office of a Jewish Mississippi lawyer and killed his twin 5-year-old sons. Sam was finally convicted, on his 3rd trial, in 1981, and Adam becomes his lawyer a few months before he is scheduled to die.in the gas chamber. This is a powerful work, though Sam is not easy to empathize with. The first half of the book I thought slow and non-exciting. But the novel is a subtle anti-capital-punishment book, and makes its points effectively. A most worth reading book. ( )

One of Grisham's best

In the corridors of Chicago's top law firm: Twenty-six-year-old Adam Hall stands ont he brink of a brillant legal career. Now he is risking it all for a death-row killer and an impossible task.

I feel about this book the way I feel about most of Grisham's books, with the possible exception of A Time to Kill: It is overly sentimental and trite and he has taken an extreme situation and manipulated it to seem like the norm.

That being said, it is a thrilling page-turner, and Grisham accurately captures that warm yet ruthless feeling of the "South" and of being "Southern." The flashbacks to racism and a world where it was acceptable to be a member of the KKK are fascinating. ( )