I’m posting a handful of book reviews that I wrote two decades ago while in college. Sadly, I can’t find reviews of John Grisham‘s better books that I’d also read back then, books like The Client and A Time to Kill, but these few will have to suffice.
The Street Lawyer was a surprisingly quick read, somewhat out of Grisham’s style. Although he offered a full plotline and cast of characters, I felt cheated. It felt more like Grisham published a long, detailed outline to the plot of a novel rather than the novel itself. He jumped from one moment to the next far too quickly—a ploy that can work for some authors like Kurt Vonnegut, but not for someone supposedly writing thrillers like this.
While in The Rainmaker or even in The Pelican Brief, Grisham spent several chapters describing a single day’s events—or sometimes write pages and pages detailing the filling out of documents—his method of writing completely changes in The Street Lawyer. It’s like he’s done away with details entirely, making this a “Grisham for Beginners,” a court epic with training wheels, a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book. John Grisham for Dummies. You get the idea.
It’s not a good look for an author of his stature (at least in those years just after the peak of his career). By ridding his book of all jargon and outlying details, Grisham inadvertently whittles away his own authority as the author with all the law expertise. Generally, John Grisham can draw some profound insights from life in his novels, but not here. I found myself at page 400 turning back to random previous pages, asking myself, “Have I read this already? Did I misplace my bookmark or something?”
That’s not a good feeling for reader. It’s a worse critique for an author.
Overall, ranking this book low. John Grisham’s generally a fantastic courtroom author, and if back in ’98 he wanted to lessen that stigma or make a new name for himself, he should have stepped away from the genre entirely (as he sort of did in A Painted House or of course Skipping Christmas). Instead, he published this lackluster book and I feel a bit cheated for having read it.
©2025 E.T.
Read More from John Grisham:
- The Rainmaker (1995)
- The Street Lawyer (1998)
- Skipping Christmas (2001)
- A Painted House (2001)
- The Summons (2002)
- The Broker (2005)
- Playing for Pizza (2007)
- Gray Mountain (2015)
- Camino Island (2017)
- The Rooster Bar (2017)