The Widow

Grisham follows up Camino’s Ghosts with a captivating legal whodunit. Small-town Virginia attorney Simon Latch is in trouble: his practice is struggling, he’s about to get divorced, and his gambling debts are piling up. A potential solution arrives when octogenarian widow Eleanor Barnett consults Latch about a will she’s had drawn up by another lawyer. Latch quickly spots that attorney’s surreptitious inclusion of a clause gifting himself almost $500,000, but when Latch learns that Barnett is a multimillionaire and has no family or friends, he sees a chance to net millions for himself by befriending her and persuading her to make him the trustee of her estate. That move comes back to haunt him when Barnett is fatally poisoned by cookies Latch bought for her, and he’s put on trial for her murder. Grisham’s prose is a cut above standard (Barnett drives “like a ninety-year-old who’d been a lousy driver seventy years earlier”), and his nuanced portrait of Latch demonstrates his gift for constructing morally flawed yet sympathetic characters. The author’s fans will be galvanized by this impressive return to form. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Co. (Oct.)