John Grisham jumps back in time to his fictional Ford County, Miss., for his latest novel, “The Reckoning.”

And it’s well worth the time spent.

A World War II hero and Ford County favorite son shoots down a popular preacher. Pete Banning walks into the church office and shoots the Rev. Dexter Bell three times at close range. Pete then tells a church employee he should contact the sheriff, walks away and waits for the law to come arrest him.

The family’s world is left spinning but the Bannings lives began unraveling prior to the post-World War II shooting. 

Pete had been declared dead during the war, believed to have died or been killed during the Bataan death march in the Philippines. His wife and children endured the loss as best they could, only to discover at war’s end, Pete was alive and coming home.

Within a year, Liza, Pete’s wife, had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a treatment facility. Then, Pete kills the preacher, is arrested and will offer nothing in his own defense. He faces the death penalty. His children face losing their father and the family’s generations-old rich farmland.

The Banning children, the townsfolks — and most importantly, the reader — wonder why.

But Pete Banning is not talking — even as the possibility of state execution looms.

The question of why propels this narrative set in the 1940s and the story does not disappoint.

Grisham is at his best here.

This is not the contemporary hodge-podge of his last novel, “The Rooster Bar,” but a well-conceived and finely plotted story with good characters and a real mystery at its core. Grisham moves from the aftermath of the shooting to how Pete and Liza met and started a family. Then the grueling World War II life in the Philippines as Pete is captured by the Japanese then escapes.

If you wonder if Grisham still has it, and some readers may have weighed the possibility after “The Rooster Bar,” “The Reckoning” proves he’s still at the top of his game.