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ttthomas 's review for:
The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town
by John Grisham
In 1982, Debbie Carter was raped and murdered at her home. Five years later, Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz were arrested for her murder. While it seemed like an open and shut case from the outside, the prosecution’s case was transparently flimsy, and landed two innocent men in jail for decades.
Rating non-fiction is weird. Like how can I rate someone’s factual life? But I’m going to try. First off, John Grisham’s writing is fantastic, and the way the book was structured made this gripping tale even more engaging. The story itself was page-turning and heartbreaking at the same time. John Grisham made me feel for and understand these two men, and also understand the criminal case against them more than I ever thought I would. Grisham really tried to pull from as many sides as he could, interviewing everyone from the families of the two men to the prosecutor that put the two men in jail.
If there was one thing that I didn’t jive with, it was the weird tangents into other inmates on death row. Pages were dedicated to death row inmates that weren’t Ron or Dennis (who wasn’t even on death row until his retrial). And while some of the inmates interacted with Ron and Dennis, others had no correlation to the two men except for the fact that they did crime in the same city, and it really took away from the stories of Ron and Dennis.
Overall, I do recommend this book, but I caution people to read up on the book beforehand, as there are detailed accounts of murders, rapes, and sexual assaults.
Rating non-fiction is weird. Like how can I rate someone’s factual life? But I’m going to try. First off, John Grisham’s writing is fantastic, and the way the book was structured made this gripping tale even more engaging. The story itself was page-turning and heartbreaking at the same time. John Grisham made me feel for and understand these two men, and also understand the criminal case against them more than I ever thought I would. Grisham really tried to pull from as many sides as he could, interviewing everyone from the families of the two men to the prosecutor that put the two men in jail.
If there was one thing that I didn’t jive with, it was the weird tangents into other inmates on death row. Pages were dedicated to death row inmates that weren’t Ron or Dennis (who wasn’t even on death row until his retrial). And while some of the inmates interacted with Ron and Dennis, others had no correlation to the two men except for the fact that they did crime in the same city, and it really took away from the stories of Ron and Dennis.
Overall, I do recommend this book, but I caution people to read up on the book beforehand, as there are detailed accounts of murders, rapes, and sexual assaults.