The Chamber by John Grisham
BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
-Print: COPYRIGHT ©: May 1, 1994; ISBN: 978- 0385424721; PUBLISHER: Doubleday (Random House); First Printing edition; PAGES: 496; UNABRIDGED (Info from Amazon)
-Digital: COPYRIGHT ©: (5/1/94) March 9, 2010; ISBN: 978-0307575999; PUBLISHER: Bantam Dell (Random House); PAGES: 686; UNABRIDGED. (Info from Amazon and the digital version accessible through Libby)
*Audio: COPYRIGHT ©: (5/1/94) 5/21/1999; PUBLISHER: Audible; DURATION: 16:59:00; Unabridged; (Info from Amazon)
-Feature Film or tv: 1996 with Chris O'Donnell, Gene Hackman, Faye Dunaway, Lela Rochon, Robert Prosky, Raymond J. Barry, and David Marshall Grant.

SERIES: Not officially but it references an earlier book/case that took place in Ford County.
MAIN CHARACTERS: (Not comprehensive)
Sam Cayhall – KKK member convicted of bombing/murder
Adam Hall – Sam’s grandson and lawyer
Lee Cayhall Booth – Adam’s aunt
Marvin Kramer – lawyer
Rollie Wedge – KKK member
Jeremiah (Jerry) Dogan – KKK member

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
How I picked it. It was next in line of my John Grisham reads.
What it was about: Adam Hall began studying law when he learned he had a grandfather on death row, and now he’s managed to join the Chicago law firm that is representing his grandfather, and get on the case.
What I thought: I believe, even though it’s fiction, that I learned more about the situation, at least as it was in 1994..
AUTHOR:
John Grisham:
From Wikipedia:
“Grisham, the second of five children, was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Wanda (née Skidmore) and John Ray Grisham.[6] His father was a construction worker and a cotton farmer, and his mother was a homemaker.[9] When Grisham was four years old, his family settled in Southaven, Mississippi, a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee.[6]
As a child, he wanted to be a baseball player.[8] As noted in the foreword to Calico Joe, Grisham gave up playing baseball at the age of 18, after a game in which a pitcher aimed a beanball at him, and narrowly missed doing the young Grisham grave harm.
Although Grisham's parents lacked formal education, his mother encouraged him to read and prepare for college.[1] He drew on his childhood experiences for his novel A Painted House.[6] Grisham started working for a plant nursery as a teenager, watering bushes for $1.00 an hour. He was soon promoted to a fence crew for $1.50 an hour. He wrote about the job: "there was no future in it". At 16, Grisham took a job with a plumbing contractor but says he "never drew inspiration from that miserable work".[10]
Through one of his father's contacts, he managed to find work on a highway asphalt crew in Mississippi at age 17. It was during this time that an unfortunate incident got him "serious" about college. A fight with gunfire broke out among the crew causing Grisham to run to a nearby restroom to find safety. He did not come out until after the police had detained the perpetrators. He hitchhiked home and started thinking about college. His next work was in retail, as a salesclerk in a department store men's underwear section, which he described as "humiliating". By this time, Grisham was halfway through college. Planning to become a tax lawyer, he was soon overcome by "the complexity and lunacy" of it. He decided to return to his hometown as a trial lawyer.[11]
He attended the Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi and later attended Delta State University in Cleveland.[6] Grisham changed colleges three times before completing a degree.[1] He eventually graduated from Mississippi State University in 1977, receiving a B.S. degree in accounting. He later enrolled in the University of Mississippi School of Law to become a tax lawyer, but his interest shifted to general civil litigation. He graduated in 1981 with a J.D. degree.[6]
After leaving law school, he participated in some missionary work in Brazil, under the First Baptist Church of Oxford.[12]”

NARRATOR:
Alexander Adams - From Wikipedia:
“Grover Gardner (b 1956)[1] is an American narrator of audiobooks. As of May 2018, he has narrated over 1,200 books.[2] He was the Publishers Weekly "Audiobook Narrator of the Year" (2005) and is among AudioFile magazine's "Best Voices of the Century".[2]

Gardner is a native of Pennsylvania.[1] He attended high school in Belgium.[1] He graduated from Florida's Rollins College in 1978 as a theater major.[1]
In 1981, Gardner was an actor in the Washington, D.C. region, working at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company under Howard Shalwitz.[4] He won a number of lead actor awards for plays such as Metamorphoses and The Rocky Horror Show.
Gardner heard about and auditioned for the Library of Congress' Books for the Blind Program. He worked at fellow theater actor Flo Gibson's Audio Book Contractors in the DC region to produce classic literature on cassette tape. Over time, his acting career tapered off and audiobooks took over.[1] Eventually he established his own independent studio in Maryland where he recorded books for Books on Tape.[5] In 2007, he moved to Ashland, Oregon where he became Studio Director of Blackstone Audio.[5]
Gardner has also narrated under the aliases Tom Parker and Alexander Adams.
GENRE:
Fiction; Legal Thriller; Crime
TIME FRAME:
1967; 1979; 1990’s
LOCATION:
Greenville, Mississippi; Parchman Penitentiary
SUBJECTS: Death row; incarceration; Death penalty; dysfunctional families; Klu-Klux-Klan; inequality; legal procedures
DEDICATION:
I didn’t find it.

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
“Wedge’s car was a rental from the Memphis airport. He retrieved a small bag from the backseat, locked the car, and left it at the truck stop. The green Pontiac with Cayhall behind the wheel left Cleveland and headed south on Highway 61. It was almost 3 a.m., and there was no traffic. A few miles south of the village of Shaw, Cayhall turned onto a dark, gravel road and stopped. Rollie instructed him to stay in the car while he inspected the explosives. Sam did as he was told. Rollie took his bag with him to the trunk where he inventoried the dynamite, the blasting caps, and the fuse. He left his bag in the trunk, closed it, and told Sam to head to Greenville.
They drove by Kramer’s office for the first time around 4 a.m. The street was deserted, and dark, and Rollie said something to the effect that this would be their easiest job yet.
“Too bad we can’t bomb his house,” Rollie said softly as they drove by the Kramer home.
“Yeah Too bad,” Sam said nervously. “But he’s got a guard, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. But the guard would be easy.”
“Yeah, I guess. But he’s got kids in there, you know.”
“Kill ’em while they’re young,” Rollie said. “Little Jew bastards grow up to be big Jew bastards.”
Cayhall parked the car in an alley behind Kramer’s office. He turned off the ignition, and both men quietly opened the trunk, removed the box and the bag, and slid along a row of hedges leading to the rear door.
Sam Cayhall jimmied the rear door of the office and they were inside within seconds. Two weeks earlier, Sam had presented himself to the receptionist under the ruse of asking for directions, then asked to use the rest room. In the main hallway, between the rest room and what appeared to be Kramer’s office, was a narrow closet filled with stacks of old files and other legal rubbish.
“Stay by the door and watch the alley,” Wedge whispered coolly, and Sam did exactly as he was told. He preferred to serve as the watchman and avoid handling the explosives.
Rollie quickly sat the box on the floor in the closet, and wired the dynamite. It was a delicate exercise, and Sam’s heart raced each time as he waited. His back was always to the explosives, just in case something went wrong.
They were in the office less than five minutes. Then they were back in the alley strolling nonchalantly to the green Pontiac. They were becoming invincible. It was all so easy. They had bombed a real estate office in Jackson because the realtor had sold a house to a black couple. A Jewish realtor. They had bombed a small newspaper office because the editor had uttered something neutral on segregation. They had demolished a Jackson synagogue, the largest in the state.
They drove through the alley in the darkness, and as the green Pontiac entered a side street its headlights came on.
In each of the prior bombings, Wedge had used a fifteen-minute fuse, one simply lit with a match, very similar to a firecracker. And as part of the exercise, the team of bombers enjoyed cruising with the windows down at a point always on the outskirts of town just as the explosion ripped through the target. They had heard and felt each of the prior hits, at a nice distance, as they made their leisurely getaways.
But tonight would be different. Sam made a wrong turn somewhere, and suddenly they were stopped at a railroad crossing staring at flashing lights as a freighter clicked by in front of them. A rather long freight train. Sam checked his watch more than once. Rollie said nothing. The train passed, and Sam took another wrong turn. They were near the river, with a bridge in the distance, and the street was lined with run-down houses. Sam checked his watch again. The ground would shake in less than five minutes, and he preferred to be easing into the darkness of a lonely highway when that happened. Rollie fidgeted once as if he was becoming irritated with his driver, but he said nothing.
Another turn, another new street. Greenville was not that big a city, and if he kept turning Sam figured he could work his way back to a familiar street. The next wrong turn proved to be the last. Sam hit the brakes as soon as he realized he had turned the wrong way on a one-way street. And when he hit the brakes, the engine quit. He yanked the gearshift into park, and turned the ignition. The engine turned perfectly, but it just wouldn’t start. Then, the smell of gasoline.
“Dammit!” Sam said through clenched teeth. “Dammit!”
Rollie sat low in his seat and stared through the window.
“Dammit! It’s flooded!” He turned the key again, same result.
“Don’t run the battery down,” Rollie said slowly, calmly.
Sam was near panic. Though he was lost, he was reasonably sure they were not far from downtown. He breathed deeply, and studied the street. He glanced at his watch. There were no other cars in sight. All was quiet. It was the perfect setting for a bomb blast. He could see the fuse burning along the wooden floor. He could feel the jarring of the ground. He could hear the roar of ripping wood and sheetrock, brick and glass. Hell, Sam thought as he tried to calm himself, we might get hit with debris.”
RATING:.
4
STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
7-17-2023 to 7-30-2023 ( )

Excellent an touching story. One of my favorite "Grisham" novels. ( )

Come sempre, bellissimo! ( )

Very interesting, well written like any other Grisham book. A
lot of angles that had potential but never quite came together, although I’m sure it was supposed to end that way anyway.
( )

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