Book Review - "The Innocent Man" by John Grisham

I am a long time John Grisham fan. I have really enjoyed his legal fiction since his first book and I enjoyed his recent non-legal fiction, "Playing for Pizza", even though it wasn't critically acclaimed. I was very curious when I heard that Grisham had written a non-fiction book, "The Innocent Man", a couple of years ago but I was not in a reading phase at the time so I didn't get a chance to pick it up.

Recently I saw a reference to this book again and I read a brief description of the book online. It was at this point that I learned that the book centers on the town of Ada, Oklahoma and a real life crime in this town in the early 1980's and the incredible injustice that followed this crime. I lived and went to high-school outside a nearby town (Seminole) in the same general time frame of the initial events in the book so I really became interested in reading this book.

I purchased the book this past Friday and read it through the weekend and completed it this evening. It really is another great book by John Grisham. The writing and story telling are very compelling yet at the same time the story being told is sad and embarrassing to someone who lived very close to these events. I don't know if the book is 100% accurate but even if it is less then that, the events of the case are both unbelievable and the abuse of power is scary. The main story in the book is about two men, Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, who were wrongly convicted of a brutal crime in Ada and many years later were exonerated via DNA testing. The story also includes additional cases of wrongful convictions that overlapped with the main story.

I was very interested in the story as it was very compelling but I was also very interested as the locations and sometimes people were things that I knew about. I was away in college in Norman in 1982 when the actual crime was committed and I was living in Illinois when the trial took place so I did not remember much about the actual events but there was so much in the book that was familiar to me.

Ron Williamson, the primary character in the book, ended his high school baseball career playing for Asher in 1971. Nine years after this I was playing high school baseball and Asher was one of my high school's big rivals. There was also a reference in the book to another unsolved abduction that had occurred in Seminole prior to the crimes in this book. This reference was to a classmate of mine. Other references to places in Seminole, Ada, Norman and other places in Oklahoma all brought back many memories to my high school and college years.

The book is a great telling of a story that really needed to be told. I hope that in some way it may prevent this type of thing from happening again in some other small town. Reading the book was at times a bit surreal due to my familiarity with so much of the setting. I highly recommend the book (even if you are not from a small Oklahoma town).