The Summons - Hardcover

Grisham, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0712684263 ISBN 13: 9780712684262

Publisher: Century, 2002

Synopsis

Ray Atlee is a professor of law at the university of Virginia who is forty-three and newly single. He has a father, a very sick old man that lives alone in the ancestral home in Clanton, Mississippi; a beloved and powerful official who has towered over local law and politics for many years and is now a recluse. With the end in sight, Judge Atlee issues a summons to Ray to return home to Clanton, to discuss the details of his estate. Ray reluctantly heads south. But the meeting does not take place. The judge dies to soon, and in doing so leaves behind a shocking secret known only to Ray. And perhapes someone else...

About this title

Product Description:

/ 0712684263 / Suspense / Thrillers / Engels / English / Anglais / Englisch / hard cover / dust jacket / 15 x 24 cm / 341 .pp /

Review:

An intelligent, low-key thriller, The Summons continues John Grisham's exploration of the common decencies of a strain of American commercial story-telling in literature and film that we often link to the work of Frank Capra or O Henry. He is not afraid of parable or of setting up situations that are at once archetypal and attractively specific. This is a tale of two brothers--one is righteous, more or less, and one is not--and a question of their inheritance. Ancient Mississippi judge Atlee summons his two sons to his deathbed, but dies before he can explain himself, leaving Ray, who arrives on time unlike his drunkard brother Forest with the difficult problem of the three million dollars in used notes which are lying around the house in shoe-boxes. Ray worries about his father's posthumous reputation, about the Inland Revenue Service and about how quickly Forrest could drink himself to death with unlimited funds.

Grisham is very acute indeed on how the best of intentions lead Ray not to any significant crime or atrocity but to quietly unconscionable behaviour. And then he realises he is being followed... Grisham can build suspense out of remarkably little and has a real gift for understanding the quiet anxieties of an ordinary man. --Roz Kaveney

About this edition

• Publisher: Century
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0712684263
• ISBN 13: 9780712684262
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352