Since 1992, John Grisham has taken his years as a lawyer in Mississippi, and all the knowledge of the legal system that he absorbed as a member of the bar, to extraordinary literary success with such best-selling legal thrillers as A Time To Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Runaway Jury and most recently, A Time for Mercy.
For his latest #1 best seller The Judge’s List, a respected Florida-based judge named Ross Bannick becomes a psychopathic serial killer whose intended victims are the people who have done him wrong throughout his life, whether they be past girlfriends, law school professors, classmates or fellow lawyers. People who unknowingly are marked for death and end up on his list of doom because they either slighted or humiliated him on his path to a successful legal career.
Bannick’s modus operandi towards each vengeful murder he commits follows the same pattern. He smashes the back of their skulls in a messy, bloody manner using a metal medieval mace-like device. Then he ties them up using a certain type of rope with the body in a hog-tied position, thereby guaranteeing the victim in question to undergo a slow, painful death by strangulation.
However, it’s up to lawyer Lacy Stoltz – whose previous appearance in a Grisham novel was as the antagonist in The Whistler – and the organization that she works for, the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct (or BJC, an organization that handles complaints against the state’s judges), to get on the trail of Judge Bannick and stop him from murdering any other individual who has the misfortune of being on his list of death.
And Lacy gets a great deal of help thanks to the relentless persistence (and numerous phone calls) of Jeri Crosby, whose father was one of Bannick’s unfortunate victims 20 years earlier. Stopping Ross Bannick has become her main obsession throughout the previous two decades, and has doggedly stalked and pursued him to make sure he faces justice for murdering her father; however, along the way, Jeri has managed to uncover the fact that there were other victims of Bannick’s vindictive murder spree.
The Judge’s List is probably Grisham’s darkest book since The Chamber. To tell the story of this chilling series of serial killings and the cold-blooded, calculating, intelligent ways the murderer is able to remain a step ahead of law enforcement literally takes a page out of a Thomas Harris novel (i.e., Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs). Ross Bannick may not have the cannibalistic, gory ways of Hannibal Lecter, but his obsessive, near-self destructive personal traits that keep him going on his killing spree is just as disturbing. That’s what makes The Judge’s List such an incessant page-turner. You want to see Lacy and Jeri stop this horrific person from killing again, yet you morbidly want to find out more about Ross Bannick and what made him want to murder people in cold blood once court was adjourned.
This latest contribution to John Grisham’s continually growing collection of best-selling legal thrillers gives a much darker, macabre side to the legal profession. Vengeance, murder and obsession are the key elements to The Judge’s List, but the development of the mind of a serial killer is the element that gives this novel the necessary “boo!” to put it over the top.
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