Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Doubleday Books, and author John Grisham for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

I’ve been a fan of John Grisham’s work for many years. I can’t say I’ve read everything he’s written, but there were enough of his books that really got me to think about the law and how it works. He seems to really enjoy showing how the law doesn’t always work the way it should. The Widow is a great example of this.

Simon Latch is a small-town lawyer in northwestern Virginia. His practice, which consists mostly of bankruptcies and wills, survives, but doesn’t provide a high income. His wife also works, and they have three children. The marriage has been slowly falling apart, and although Simon remains close to the children, he spends most of his nights in a small room upstairs from his office. He has a bit of a gambling problem as well.

Into this life walks Eleanor Bennett. She contacts Simon about drawing up a new will. She had one written just a couple of months ago by another lawyer in town, but doesn’t really trust him. She also claims to have an estate worth millions of dollars and no relatives or friends to leave it to.

Simon’s initial reaction is greedy. He can see himself making hundreds of thousands in fees from managing her estate. He looks over the previous will and discovers the lawyer gave himself a substantial “gift” from her estate. Eleanor is not very forthcoming about things. She has a hard time discussing where her money comes from and won’t show him the brokerage account. She does have her broker contact Simon and confirm that she has an account with a large brokerage house in Atlanta.

Buoyed by the thought of a very large payday someday, Simon befriends Eleanor and begins taking her to lunches. It’s ostensibly a business lunch, since he does try to get her to give him more information about her estate, but mostly it’s about him taking a lonely old lady out to different ethnic restaurants to try something new. He likes Eleanor, even if something is nagging at him about the whole situation.

Eleanor has a car accident and ends up in the hospital. At the request of the hospital staff, he talks to Eleanor about her advance directives and granting him power of attorney to pay her bills for her while she’s in the hospital. She is reluctant to sign anything, but since there’s no one else, Simon has to do it. Eventually, she capitulates. Her injuries initially don’t seem too bad, but then she develops pneumonia and takes a turn for the worse. Eventually, in consultation with her doctors, Simon makes the call to end life support.

The local police are tipped off by someone to look a bit closer at Eleanor Bennett’s death. The state does an autopsy, and it’s discovered that she was poisoned. Simon is the prime suspect. Everything seems to point to him as the one person who would profit by her death. He’s arrested for murder, and his life falls apart.

The Widow was a pretty long read, but it is well worth it. Grisham really gets to the bottom of what it’s like to be falsely accused of a crime. I’ve seen it happen as well, when a woman I worked with was murdered, and the police were “sure” her husband had done it, but couldn’t prove it. A couple of years later, a man was arrested for an entirely different murder and, under questioning, admitted to my coworker’s murder along with several others. The police made up their mind that the husband was the murderer, and the case was solved; they never investigated any other possibilities. The same thing happens in The Widow. The police never look beyond Simon as a potential murderer. There were a number of other possibilities, including the lawyer who wrote the earlier will, as well as two stepsons from her second marriage. Yet none of them were investigated. In the case of the stepsons, it would seem obvious that they should get a good, hard look, but it never happens.

Grisham wrote The Widow with a good balance of Simon’s private life and his work as a lawyer. We get to know him as a person who has his faults. For the most part, though, he’s a good guy who is trying to do the right thing. I don’t think that if I were on the jury, I would have convicted him, as the evidence really seemed circumstantial (that’s probably why I’d never be chosen to be on a jury). Simon knows he’s innocent and keeps trying to figure out what he did wrong. Other than allowing for high fees to manage the estate once Eleanor was gone, there weren’t any overt cash grabs. He actually never even got paid for the work he’d done for her, nor had she paid for any of their lunches, despite supposedly having millions. There’s a point where I think he started to doubt her story, but even he admits that he enjoyed the time he spent with her.

The pace of the book is great. Grisham sets the stage slowly for the big reveals as well as Simon’s murder accusation. I could understand why he wanted to believe what Eleanor was telling him, even as she was being cagey about it. Was she a lonely old lady who tricked him? Or was she just looking for a friend? Some of her motivations will never be known, but I think she was in denial about a lot. He develops the characters well, including Simon’s soon-to-be ex-wife. I could feel for both of them as their marriage fell apart. There are also enough other possibilities for the perpetrator that I was at a loss trying to figure out what really happened.

The audiobook is narrated by Michael Beck. He’ snot one of my favorite narrators. He tries to use a few different voices, but his voice for Simon is nearly the same as his regular voice, which kept giving me the feeling that Simon was narrating, even though he wasn’t. The book is told in the third person, yet I kept feeling like Simon was the narrator. It made it a bit hard at times to follow along. A few times, I backed up the recording and listened to a section over since the perspective seemed a little confusing.

The Widow was a great book by Grisham. It is paced well and delivers a great story about what it’s like to be innocent of a crime and have the world judge you as guilty.