Review

The Reckoning is Grisham's 17th legal thriller. The book met with mixed reviews in 2018 but merits a good read if you like courtroom drama, Southern gothic grace, ambiguous race relations, and immersion in the Philippines World War II theatre to boot. Not to mention, as noted by SHA in our March 2021 issue, that Grisham is a "great storyteller." Pete Banning, from a well to do Southern farming family, is tried and executed in post-war 1947 in the first third of the book (an inverted plot structure), after he kills the local pastor in cold blood in segregated Clayton Mississippi. Pete never says why - right up to the electric chair - but the strong impression is that Pete sought to avenge what he believed was his wife Liza's infidelity while he was a POW surviving the Bataan death march and captivity in the Philippines. The pastor had helped his wife Liza get an abortion while Pete was in the Pacific and presumed dead or missing in action, and the reader assumes, until the last few pages, that Banning was correct that the pastor was philandering with Liza during the war. Upon Pete's return, Liza is sent to a mental institution under Pete's strict orders not to be visited. Pete's criminal trial after shooting the Reverend Dexter Bell in his church is depicted in fine Grisham style, and the interplay with Pete and his lawyers about how to fashion a defense to the indefensible (and pay for it) kept this trial lawyer reviewer turning the pages. The only defense available was from Pete's former soldier friends testifying about the savage impact Pete's service in the war must have had on his psyche, to which the trial judge responds, "I don't see the relevance to the crime," since Pete does not plead insanity. The book is in three parts: "The Killing" of Bell and Pete's trial and execution, "The Boneyard" flashback to Pete amid the horrors of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines after MacArthur's withdrawal, and lastly "The Betrayal" aftermath involving Bell's widow and her wrongful death suit against Pete's estate inherited by his surviving children Joel and Stella. The middle section is unique for Grisham, recounting Pete's survival in Bataan while so many of his colleagues gruesomely died, his escape, and his stirring and deadly multi-year leadership in the guerilla war campaigns by British, U.S., and Filipino soldiers against the Japanese until MacArthur returned. This middle section stands up as excellent and riveting war history from a popular novelist. The final section was in a sense dispiriting since there was little defense to the civil suit faced by Pete's children that successfully reduces their family farm and fortune. In the end, what really happened to Liza during the war is recounted to Joel and Stella by the Banning's long-serving black house servant Aunt Florry, and in Grisham style the revelation is not what the reader (or Pete would have) expected.

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