I really did not like The Confession by John Grisham. All of the trade reviewers raved about it, calling it face-paced and a page turner. The basic story involves an innocent man on death row who is about to be executed. Can the execution be stropped in time? It does keep you reading.
The problem with this book, as with so many of Grisham's recent legal thrillers, is that there is not a single truly likeable character. In Grisham's early books, the protagonist was often flawed, but you could still pull for him. In this book, the death row inmate, Donte, has given up on life. His attorney, who one would expect to be the hero, is so deeply flawed that it's impossible to really care about him. The minister who gets sucked into this crisis is also impossible to really like.
This book reads more as a diatribe against the death penalty in general and the Texas criminal system in specific. It is perfectly acceptable for a fiction work to have a message, but it should have more to offer than that!
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