Customer Reviews
A great debut - By: Coma white, 22 Nov 2008 
I've been reading crime fiction for a while now & it's common knowledge that John Grisham is considered one of the best, so it was only a matter of time until I picked up his debut novel 'A Time To Kill'. Amazon has a pretty healthy review of the synopsis & even offers an exerpt from the book so I wont delve into too much of the plot as alll you will need to know can be found there.
This is a very good debut book, an awfully good book debut or no debut & deserves to be read if you are a fan of the genre. The legalese & courtroom scenes are a pleasure to read, the length though abundant is well paced & never fails to lose its speed. The main characters are described beautifully & theres a cast of endearing supporting characters. The way Grisham describes the southern town invaded by black protestors & the imminent threat of the Ku Klux Klan is astounding. You feel as if your in Clanton, living, breathing & being part of the infamous Carl Lee Hailey trial.
I highly recommend this book, you will not be sorry.
A Visceral Look at Small-Town Justice in an Imaginary South - By: Donald Mitchell, 30 Jul 2008 
A Time to Kill is not for those with weak stomachs. In his first novel, John Grisham holds nothing back in describing man's inhumanity to man. If you like reading about violence that would make those with weak stomachs miss a meal, this is your book.
The premise of the book is a thought-provoking one: How would a Southern smalll town treat a crime by an African-American perpetrated with malice aforethought that it would have permitted a white southerner to get away with?
The book's best qualities are exploring the roots of racial prejudice.
For those who like legal thrillers where there's some action, this is far more than your usual courtroom drama. It comes closer to the kind of taut threat that permeated To Kill a Mockingbird. The only difference is that Grisham conjures up an intersection in time between the old & new South that never happened.
I found that the book was predictable in its over-the-top treatment of what would have made for good drama. But the extreme situations weakened the plot by making it seem unlikely. I suspect it was a writing method used to be sure that those who didn't know about the old South would appreciate the delicate nature of the emotions involved.
If you want to get a sense of how far Grisham has come, read this book & then The Client. Fortunately, Grisham learned how to back off from writing over the top & has become an excellent novelist.
You'll keep turning the pages of this book. I doubt if very many people put it down unfinished.
A Visceral Look at Small-Town Justice in an Imaginary South - By: Donald Mitchell, 30 Jul 2008 A Time to Kill is not for those with weak stomachs. In his first novel, John Grisham holds nothing back in describing man's inhumanity to man. If you like reading about violence that would make those with weak stomachs miss a meal, this is your book.
The premise of the book is a thought-provoking one: How would a Southern smalll town treat a crime by an African-American perpetrated with malice aforethought that it would have permitted a white southerner to get away with?
The book's best qualities are exploring the roots of racial prejudice.
For those who like legal thrillers where there's some action, this is far more than your usual courtroom drama. It comes closer to the kind of taut threat that permeated To Kill a Mockingbird. The only difference is that Grisham conjures up an intersection in time between the old & new South that never happened.
I found that the book was predictable in its over-the-top treatment of what would have made for good drama. But the extreme situations weakened the plot by making it seem unlikely. I suspect it was a writing method used to be sure that those who didn't know about the old South would appreciate the delicate nature of the emotions involved.
If you want to get a sense of how far Grisham has come, read this book & then The Client. Fortunately, Grisham learned how to back off from writing over the top & has become an excellent novelist.
You'll keep turning the pages of this book. I doubt if very many people put it down unfinished.
Good but the film is better - By: Hugh Janus, 25 Apr 2008 After watching the film version of "A Time to Kill" for about the thirteenth time on TV I decided I decided to turn to the book to see how Grisham tells the story. I was expecting a more or less one-to-one correspondence between the two, but was surprised to find a number of differences, most of which to redound to the advantage of the film. This is an entertaining read & I recommend it to Grisham fans, but I can just picture Grisham watching the film version & thinking to himself "why didn't I think of that?" on so many occasions. This is especiallly true toward the end where the film finishes with a dramatic climax brought about by the skill & dedication of the story's protagonist lawyer, whereas in the book we simply seem to stumble from coincidence to coincidence, with the main resolution brought about by a completely incidental character who is only introduced a few pages before the end of the book. In many film adaptations the writers, pressured for concision, omit relevant & illuminating parts of the book, often at the expense of depth. With "A Time to Kill" this is entirely reversed. Grisham has a tendency to include too much detail, not so much in his descriptions, but in the minutiae of the legal process, so much so that I often felt the plot losing its bite as the same scenes were repeated a few too many times (eg Jake visiting Lucien & getting drunk, or everyone getting drunk at Jake's office). By virtue of its brevity, the film condenses these revealing yet ultimately redundant scences & keeps a much tighter pace. I admit that I read this book with the bias of knowing the film very well, but since there is a 2 hour, more polished, more gripping, more refined & more witty film version of the very interesting premise of this book I find it hard to rate it very highly.
padlpalda;l - By: Mr. L. Wright, 17 Jul 2007 i share the same thoughts regarding this book as the previous reviewer. dispite this i still found it to be a quite an entertaining read
