The Reckoning

The Reckoning (2018) by John Grisham is the author’s 40th novel and his seventh novel set in Clanton, Mississippi. Grisham has twice won the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and has also received the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction. Eight of his novels have been adapted into films, and one, The Firm, spawned a 2012 television series that takes place 10 years after the original story. Overall, his books have sold 300 million copies, and he is one of only three authors whose books have sold at least 2 million copies on their first printing.

Page numbers are from the 2018 Kindle e-book edition.

Content Warning: This novel depicts incidents of racism, mental illness, capital punishment, and graphic violence.

Plot Summary

World War II veteran and former prisoner of war Pete Banning has been back in Clanton, Mississippi, for a year when he gets up one morning, goes into town, and shoots Dexter Bell, the pastor of the Methodist church. Afterward, he returns home and waits for the sheriff. When questioned by Sheriff Nix Gridley, Pete repeats only that he has nothing to say.

Pete's grown children, Joel and Stella, return home to Clanton, hoping to understand their father’s actions, but Pete continues refusing to explain himself. Pete also blocks the children’s attempts to speak with Liza—his wife and their mother. Soon after Pete’s return from the war, his wife Liza was institutionalized after having a mental health crisis.

Pete appears to have completely accepted his fate; he will spend his life in prison and most likely die in the electric chair. He refuses to participate in his own defense. He rejects his lawyer’s urging that he take a plea of temporary insanity or take the stand to explain himself. Some of his former fellow soldiers testify to his heroism in the war, hoping to secure at least a life sentence rather than capital punishment. The trial results in a guilty verdict and the death sentence. The governor of Mississippi offers to commute Pete’s sentence if he will give his reason for committing the murder. Pete refuses, and he is executed by electrocution, a difficult and gruesome death.

Part 2, “The Boneyard,” goes back in time 20 years to Pete’s graduation from West Point and meeting with Liza. The two engage in a passionate romance before eloping. Pete continues to serve in the military until the death of his parents, when he returns to Mississippi to run the family cotton plantation. He puts the farm back on a profitable footing and is well loved by his field hands, who live rent free on his land. He and Liza have two children. They both want a large family and continue trying enthusiastically for more children, but Liza experiences four miscarriages.

Pete is called back to active duty in the Army shortly before the US enters World War II. He is sent to the Philippines, where US forces are outmatched by the Japanese and are forced to surrender when General MacArthur retreats to Australia. The Japanese treat the captured American soldiers brutally and sadistically. Thousands of American soldiers die on the way to prison camps. At one point, Pete is knocked unconscious and left in a ditch to die. He survives and rejoins the march, but his former companions believe him to be dead, and word of his death reaches Liza, who now believes herself to be a widow.

Later, sick and half-starved after a year in the prison camp, Pete is being shipped to a forced labor camp in Japan. He is fortunate to be above deck when the ship carrying him is torpedoed. Most of the American captives in the hold are killed, but Pete and a fellow US soldier, Clay Wampler, are rescued by Filipino fishermen. The fishermen put them ashore, where they join a guerrilla army of American and Filipino soldiers in the mountains. The guerrillas harry the Japanese, and Pete survives disease and severe injuries until, finally, US forces retake the Philippines. Pete returns home to Mississippi. Liza is astounded and overjoyed to learn that Pete is alive after all, but for some reason, after Pete’s return, their love life never resumes its former passion, and Liza soon has a mental health crisis and is hospitalized.

Part 3, “The Betrayal,” picks up where Part 1 left off. Pastor Bell’s widow has instituted a legal suit to seize the Banning estate as damages for her husband’s murder. Pete’s children, Joel and Stella, are fighting the case but will probably lose. Joel and Stella are finally allowed to see their mother. Liza refuses to tell them what she knows about the motive behind the murder. The children wonder whether Liza might have had an affair with Pastor Bell.

The lawsuit grinds on. Joel is in law school and Stella is working as a teacher. Liza escapes the institution and comes home. She has a long talk with Florry, Pete’s sister, confessing the story behind Pete’s actions. She then dies by suicide on her husband’s grave. Joel and Stella eventually lose the wrongful death suit, and all of Pete Banning’s property is taken by Pastor Bell’s widow.

Florry finally tells Joel and Stella Liza’s story. When Liza believed her husband to be dead, she consoled herself with a brief affair with Jupe, one of the family’s Black field hands. She became pregnant, but relations between Black people and white people were illegal. Liza would have been disgraced, driven out of town, and possibly prosecuted, but Jupe would have been killed. Pastor Bell took Liza to Memphis for an abortion. She contracted an infection from the procedure and was unable to resume her previously vigorous marital relationship with Pete after his return.

Eventually, Liza confessed to Pete about the abortion, but she was still terrified to admit she’d been intimate with a Black man, so Pete believed Bell was the father. After Liza’s mental health crisis, Pete blamed Bell. He shot Bell and resigned himself to death. Joel and Stella are brokenhearted by the waste of it all and resolve never to return to Clanton.