The Guardians

Some John Grisham books are dull. Some drag. Some seem anti-climactic or filled with characters who don’t feel completely authentic.

It’s all right to say this. He’s written a lot of books. Many of them are pretty good, a few are even excellent. Whether excellent, pretty good or even the dull ones, Grisham is usually readable.

“The Guardians” rises high into the pretty good category. 

Cullen Post was an attorney who was exhausted by the dead-end of representing bad guys as a public defender. He abandoned the law, became an Episcopal minister then returned to the law with Guardian Ministries, an organization dedicated to freeing inmates who have been wrongfully convicted.

Grisham jumps right into Post’s mission – a last-minute reprieve for a wrongly convicted man facing execution. Then, it’s off to another case where a man has been wrongly imprisoned for more than 20 years for the brutal killing of a small-town lawyer.

“The Guardians” and Cullen Post are the types of Grisham novel and character that one may wonder or even wish the author would turn into an on-going series. Occasionally, Grisham creates these characters who seem built for an on-going series but are never seen again in a Grisham novel – at least not with the same name or job. There’s some familiar connective tissue that holds characters together, it’s easy to replace one with another.

“The Guardians” is a pretty good Grisham read, full of suspense and adventures. As well as something that might have readers wondering just how many innocent people are sitting in prison.