The Widow

The legal thriller, a genre that surged in popularity in the late 20th century, often focuses on a morally compromised protagonist whose professional life becomes entangled with a criminal conspiracy. The genre is in some ways an outgrowth of earlier noir detective fiction, which features similarly flawed protagonists who confront intractable systems of power. Along with John Grisham, authors like Scott Turow, whose 1987 novel Presumed Innocent centers a prosecutor accused of murder, and William Diehl, whose 1993 novel Primal Fear is about a shady attorney defending an altar boy accused of murder, established the conventions of the genre. Typically, novels in this genre follow flawed professionals who, when faced with systemic corruption or immense personal temptation, bend or break the law. This framework provides an engine for suspense while exploring the fragility of personal and professional ethics.

The Widow builds directly on this tradition through its protagonist, Simon Latch, a disillusioned small-town lawyer whose “law school dreams of riches had faded so dim they were almost gone” (1). The appearance of Eleanor Barnett and her supposed multimillion-dollar fortune immediately reignites his ambition, but it also triggers his ethical collapse. He lies to his secretary, unethically usurps a rival attorney, and drafts a will that places him in complete control of his client’s massive estate. This rapid descent into dubious morality, driven by a combination of career burnout and greed, depicts how easily principles can be abandoned when the stakes become life-changing.

However, Grisham also uses the novel to explore the issue of false conviction, a cause for which he has been a longtime activist as a board member of the Innocence Project, an organization that uses DNA evidence to free unjustly imprisoned people. While Simon is clearly unsympathetic in a variety of ways, his conviction shows the bigger systemic flaws of US legal institutions. When the judge declares him innocent, she points to several real-life examples of people whose messy lives made them vulnerable to conviction at trial but who were later exonerated based on DNA evidence.