Simon Latch is a small town lawyer whose practice and personal life are both falling apart. An elderly widow hires him to draft a new will covering a fortune nobody knew she had, and he starts scheming to get control of it. Then she turns up murdered and he gets charged with it.
Grisham calls this his first real whodunit, and the shape is different from his usual. The legal thriller normally asks whether the system will do the right thing. This asks who did it.
Making the lawyer genuinely greedy rather than merely naive is the better choice here. Latch is not a good man having a bad week.
Read November 2025.
