He feels some sympathy for Drew, but as the county’s first Black sheriff, he walks a tightrope every day.

The sheriff, Ozzie Wall, is furious to find he’s been kept out of the loop on Kofer’s deterioration. That’s not unusual in such situations what is suspicious is that all records of those calls have disappeared. Some of them had answered domestic violence calls to his home, only to have Josie decline to press charges. That opinion holds even as it comes out that many of Kofer’s friends on the force knew he was a violent drunk whose drinking was escalating. The town’s police see Stu Kofer as one of their own and make clear to Jake that they expect to see his killer get the death penalty. No other local lawyer has argued a capital case Jake has the job, like it or not. He knows all too well that the case will arouse intense emotions, and his business depends on the regard of his community - as does the happiness of his no-nonsense wife, Carla, and their young daughter, Hanna. Jake does not want to be Drew’s attorney. Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started. There’s no question about that Drew has admitted it, first to his 14-year-old sister, Kiera, as she sat on the kitchen floor cradling their mother, then to the police when they arrived in response to the kids' 911 call. The 16-year-old son of Kofer’s girlfriend is charged with capital murder.ĭrew Gamble shot Kofer, with the deputy’s own gun. That gunshot in the night killed Stuart Kofer, a county sheriff’s deputy. Then his old friend and mentor Judge Omar Noose (whose name sounds like he wandered out of a Dickens novel) hands him another of those apparently unwinnable, and probably utterly unprofitable, cases. Jake is suing on behalf of the infant daughter who wasn’t in the car that night his witnesses say the crossing signals weren’t working. His highest hopes for a solid payday rest on a lawsuit he’s pursuing involving a collision between a car and a train that left a family of four dead. This book is set in 1990, just five years after the events of A Time to Kill, and Jake is still hustling for cases in Clanton. Grisham wrote Sycamore Row, a sequel to A Time to Kill, in 2013, and he’s brought Jake back for a third act in A Time for Mercy. Its lawyer hero, Jake Brigance, took on a seemingly unwinnable case boiling with issues of race that split the fictional small town of Clanton, Miss., and nearly cost him his life. His first novel, A Time to Kill, published in 1988 and made into a hit movie in 1996, grew directly out of his practice of law in a small town in Mississippi.

John grisham a time for mercy review