The Chamber | John Grisham | The Chamber Review...great!

The Chamber | John Grisham | An Extended Look at Guilt, Remorse, Punishment, and Redemption

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The Chamber

	The Chamber John Grisham Delta, 2005 - 640 pages average customer review:based on 281 reviews view larger image
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In the corridors of Chicago's top law firm:

Twenty -six-year-old Adam Hall stands on the brink of a brilliant legal career. Now he is risking it all for a death-row killer and an impossible case.

Maximum Security Unit, Mississippi State Prison:

Sam Cayhall is a former Klansman and unrepentant racist now facing the death penalty for a fatal bombing in 1967. He has run out of chances -- except for one: the young, liberal Chicago lawyer who just happens to be his grandson.

While the executioners prepare the gas chamber, while the protesters gather and the TV cameras wait, Adam has only days, hours, minutes to save his client. For between the two men is a chasm of shame, family lies, and secrets -- including the one secret that could save Sam Cayhall's life... or cost Adam his.

From the Hardcover edition.

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The Chamber Review...great!

A wonderful book although I am late in reading it based on the publication date.
It kept me up late reading it and the characters were well written.
Slightly disapppointed in the late Rollie appearance which I thought Lee was tied to but never the less Sam protected his family and I sort of liked him at the end and felt bad for him.
The beginning of the book was quick moving and I enjoyed the pace.
Hats off to John Grisham.
Staci

An Extended Look at Guilt, Remorse, Punishment, and Redemption

If your idea of a good book is one where there is lots of action and fascinating twists and turns of plot complications pop up on every page, you shouldn't go anywhere near The Chamber. If, however, you would like to gain a visceral sense of the issues around capital punishment, The Chamber is a well-constructed fictional treatment. It won't be a pretty or a pleasant experience, but neither is capital punishment.

I remember as a youngster carefully following the case of Caryl Chessman, a convicted robber and rapist who was executed in California's gas chamber. Reading The Chamber brought back those visceral memories of thinking through my reactions to the death penalty. I became an opponent. Most people who read this book will too.

John Grisham does a good job of making the book about the death penalty, rather than the general flaws in the legal system. He also explains the reasons why gas chambers were an awful way to execute criminals.

The condemned man in the story is clearly guilty, by his own admission, in the book; but Grisham makes him somewhat appealing: Grisham wants us to think about what should happen to this old white man, Sam Cayhall, a KKK member who participated in terror bombings in the South during the Civil Rights era. Grisham's clever idea for this book is to have Sam's grandson Adam Hall, who doesn't know his grandfather, handle the last few weeks of desperate appeals. Hall becomes a surrogate for a neutral observer in a situation where there can be no neutral observers.

I was impressed by the plotting and character development in the story. Murder creates more victims than most people realize, even among the killer's family. Grisham adds those dimensions in persuasive fashion.

The book's main weakness is that he pushes our noses a bit too much into nitty gritty of defending Death Row cases. Unless you are a lawyer (which I am), you won't find a lot of this very interesting. But if you are lawyer who hasn't been near a capital case, you'll find this book to be quite startling in terms of describing a situation for defense lawyers where they have little hope to win . . . but lots of chances to experience a broken heart.

If you want a shorter look at Grisham's views on the subject, you might enjoy the non-fiction The Innocent Man more than The Chamber.

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Not bad/not good

This book was a very pedestrian effort. It was a straight line through a death penalty case. No plot twists, nothing really that interesting at all. At over 600 pages it was too long. You can spend your time and money better elsewhere

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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