480 pages
English language
Published May 14, 2014 by Random House Publishing Group.
In this novel the author takes you back to where it all began in A Time to Kill. Now we return to that famous courthouse in Clanton as Jake Brigance once again finds himself embroiled in a fiercely controversial trial; a trial that will expose old racial tensions and force Ford County to confront its tortured history. Seth Hubbard is a wealthy man dying of lung cancer. He trusts no one. Before he hangs himself from a sycamore tree, Hubbard leaves a new, handwritten, will. It is an act that drags his adult children, his black maid, and Jake into a conflict as riveting and dramatic as the murder trial that made Brigance one of Ford County's most notorious citizens, just three years earlier. The second will raises far more questions than it answers. Why would Hubbard leave nearly all of his fortune to his maid? Had chemotherapy and painkillers …
In this novel the author takes you back to where it all began in A Time to Kill. Now we return to that famous courthouse in Clanton as Jake Brigance once again finds himself embroiled in a fiercely controversial trial; a trial that will expose old racial tensions and force Ford County to confront its tortured history. Seth Hubbard is a wealthy man dying of lung cancer. He trusts no one. Before he hangs himself from a sycamore tree, Hubbard leaves a new, handwritten, will. It is an act that drags his adult children, his black maid, and Jake into a conflict as riveting and dramatic as the murder trial that made Brigance one of Ford County's most notorious citizens, just three years earlier. The second will raises far more questions than it answers. Why would Hubbard leave nearly all of his fortune to his maid? Had chemotherapy and painkillers affected his ability to think clearly? And what foes ita ll have to do with a piece of land once known as Sycamore Row? -- From book jacket.
Grisham isn't the guy you turn to for ironclad realism, but he sure can write characters that make you want to keep reading. This was a more satisfying and engrossing read than the synopsis would have you expect.
Formulaic. If you read time to kill, you know the progression of this novel, and how each turn will come. It is like driving the same route home day after day, knowing the twists and turns, hoping a little but for so,etching just a little different along the way, but it is always the same turns the same view, just colored by the seasons.
