John Grisham’s The Widow: a legal mystery that asks if a sleazy lawyer can ever be seen as a ‘good’ victim

By Sarah-Jane Coyle, PhD Candidate, School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen's University Belfast

Is there such a thing as the “perfect victim”? Is it an old lady who is suddenly mugged on the street? And where does a greedy lawyer, eager to profit from an elderly widow’s demise, fit in? Would we have sympathy if he was manipulated and wrongly accused of her murder?

Such questions of victimhood lie at the heart of John Grisham’s new novel, The Widow. The book is marketed as a classic Grisham courtroom drama with the addition of a whodunnit-style mystery – the writer’s first foray into this genre.
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