John Grisham’s latest novel, The Widow (2025), is noteworthy. Many of Grisham’s novels have touched on wrongful convictions, but The Widow ups the ante in an important way.
Grisham earned a Juris Doctor (J.D.) in 1981 at the University of Mississippi School of Law. He practiced law as a criminal defense attorney, and even served in Mississippi state legislature for about ten years before turning his attention to full-time writing. While he published his first book, A Time to Kill, in 1988, it wasn’t until his second—The Firm (1991)—that he established his position as “America’s favorite storyteller“.
He went on to write such books as The Confession (2010), The Guardians (2019), and—even earlier—a nonfiction book that Netflix later adapted for screen: The Innocent Man (2006). In 2024, he published Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions.
The thread woven through each of these books is plain. The United States justice system has—for a variety of reasons—wrongfully imprisoned people for crimes they didn’t commit. In The Confession, the crime was murder, and the person wrongfully imprisoned faces the death penalty.
In The Widow, Simon Latch is a lawyer who wishes for just a little bit more. So when a wealthy widow comes into his life asking for a will, Simon does everything he can to help her, to make her comfortable, to reassure her that he has her best interests at heart. But when she dies, and it is proven to be a result of poison, Simon finds himself behind bars.
As he sets out to prove his innocence, his fate rests in the hands of a jury of his peers. Will they declare him guilty or find him innocent?
Grisham has been writing stories about lawyers, courtrooms, corruption, and the law for thirty-five years. He has made it very clear that he stands for the little guy. He serves on the board of both The Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries, organizations that work with wrongfully convicted prisoners.
John Grisham’s The Widow is a textbook example of empathy in literature. He forces the reader—especially the lawyers among his readership—to look in the mirror. “If this were you,” he asks, “would you want an organization like these around to help you out? Do you trust our justice system as it currently stands to mete out justice if you were Simon in this case? Do you practice the law in such a way that these charges couldn’t possibly stick to you?”
In this with you.
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