The Rogue Lawyer by John Grisham

              Whenever I finished reading a book from OverDrive, I quickly looked for another.   Because of new restraints imposed by greedy publishers, it is now much more difficult to find a book that is immediately available for download on OverDrive, most books now have long waiting lists, but fortunately, I discovered that most of the older John Grisham novels were readily available, so I read a handful of them since March. 

       The one I liked the best was The Rogue Lawyer.   It tells the story of Sebastian Rudd, a much hated lawyer; hated because he took cases and defended people who the public despised.  Rudd took those cases because no other lawyers would defend them.  As a result he was often assaulted, his life threatening, and his office shot at and burned.  These actions caused him to live in a different place every week, and work out of a van that he used as an office. 

              One of the fascinating things that really made the novel memorable was one of his cases in which he defended a retired man whose wife was murdered by a police squad.  Even though Grisham wrote this novel in 2015, this case of police murder is eerily similar to the Brionna Taylor police murder that happened this summer. 

       In the novel a neighbor boy of the retired couple was a drug dealer. He recognized that the retired couple’s Internet was not secure, so he began using it to order his drug supplies.  The police were able to pinpoint the location of the internet being used for the drug transactions and mounted an attack on the retired couple’s home.

       The police SWAT team were all macho and gung-ho, decked out in their military style garb, and using military-style automatic weapons.  They had a “no knock” warrant and bashed down the front door in the dead of the night.  When they battered down the door, the retired couple’s dogs, who were asleep in the living room, started barking, so were shot by the police, the gunfire and commotion causing the retired owner of the house to think he and his wife were being attacked by a gang.   

       He grabbed a gun and shot at the intruders in his darken living room, wounding an officer.  The rest of the SWAT team then opened fire, killing the wife.  When the dust settled and the police realized what they had done, instead of admitting their mistake, they used the media to paint the retiree as a drug dealer and cop shooter.  Rudd took up the retired man’s case against the police.

      I found the fact that Grisham was so well versed in crime and law to imagine a situation which was so similar to an incident that happened years later, to be pretty impressive.   The cases the lawyer becomes involved in brings the reader in contact with a lot of characters they wouldn’t want to meet in read life, making The Rogue Lawyer an engaging book to spend time with. 

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