The innocent man
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Booklist Review
Grisham turns his considerable procedural skills to nonfiction with this examination of a wrongful-conviction case that incarcerated a man on Death Row for 11 years, breaking him in body and spirit. Grisham decided to try his hand at true crime after reading a 2004 New York Times obituary for Ron Williamson, a former Oakland As baseball player and Death Row inmate who was one of nearly 200 people exonerated through the efforts of the Innocence Project. Grisham begins with the backstory to the murder of a young cocktail waitress in Ada, Oklahoma, in 1982, moving on to the crime scene and the life of Williamson, who was convicted of the murder. Off to a flying start with the murder itself, the narrative starts to sag with Grishams overly long examination of Williamsons life prior to his arrest. It picks up again with the trial (Grishams wheelhouse, of course) and the litany of junk science, jailhouse snitches, and shoddy police work that led to Williamsons conviction. Unfortunately, the rollercoaster slows once again with Grishams lengthy recital of what happened to Williamson in prison and what led to his exoneration. Ironically, the very qualities that make Grishams legal thrillers compelling make this nonfiction work often tedious. Painstaking accounts of procedure and delineation of character are better suited to a venue supported by a spine of suspense. Grishams plot-driven fiction fans may find themselves more than a little bored by this poorly paced account."--"Fletcher, Connie" Copyright 2007 Booklist
Publisher's Weekly Review
Grisham's first work of nonfiction focuses on the tragedy of Ron Williamson, a baseball hero from a small town in Oklahoma who winds up a dissolute, mentally unstable Major League washout railroaded onto death row for a hometown rape and murder he did not commit. Judging by this author-approved abridgment, Grisham has chosen to present Williamson's painful story (and that of his equally innocent "co-conspirator," Dennis Fritz) as straightforward journalism, eschewing the more familiar "nonfiction novel" approach with its reconstructed dialogues and other adjustments for dramatic purpose. This has resulted in a book that, while it includes such intriguing elements as murder, rape, detection and judicial injustice, consists primarily of objective reportage, albeit shaded by the now-proven fact of Williamson's innocence. The absence of dialogue or character point of view could make for a rather bland audio. Boutsikaris avoids that by reverting to what might be called old-fashioned round-the-campfire storytelling, treating the lengthy exposition to vocal interpretations, subtle and substantial. He narrates the events leading up to the 1982 rape and murder of a young cocktail waitress with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, moving on to astonishment at the prosecution's use of deceit and false testimony to convict Williamson and Fritz and, eventually, elation at the exoneration of the two innocent men. Throughout, he maintains an appealing conversational tone, an effect made all the more remarkable by the book's nearly total absence of conversation. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
(See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/06) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Library Journal Reviews
Grisham does nonfiction (his first ever), and that's all we know. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.