What are you reading the week of March 4, 2012?

[skippercollector]

22. The Runaway Jury

Believe it or not, The Runaway Jury (copyright 1996) is the first John Grisham novel I've read. I picked up a nice hardback copy cheap at a garage sale.
If I hadn't seen the movie Runaway Jury twice (once in the theater, once on TV), I would never have understood what was going on! So many characters! Not just the jury, but their families and co-workers. Not just the lawyers and judge, but their assistants and co-workers. It was almost impossible to keep everyone straight.
The plot concerns a civil trial in Biloxi. A woman whose husband died of lung cancer has sued a cigarette manufacturer. If you've seen the movie, the head of the jury, Nicholas Easter (John Cusack) and his girlfriend Marlee (Rachel Weisz), are much more sympathetic characters. They're not that way in the novel. But one thing that the book cleared up that the movie didn't explain was how Nick ended up on a jury for a trial in which he was very interested in the subject matter. In the book, Nick wasn't actually summoned, he just showed up, saying he'd been selected, leaving the court to wonder if it had lost his paperwork regarding the summons.
The writing itself was kind of dry and none of the characters were well-developed or interesting.