The Last Juror

Willie Traynor is twenty-three, a college dropout already working as a reporter at the Ford County Times when the paper goes bankrupt. He borrows fifty thousand dollars from his grandmother and buys it. Months later a young widow named Rhoda Kassellaw is raped and murdered in her own home, and the story that will make Willie's paper lands in his lap.

The accused is Danny Padgitt, whose family ran whiskey and now grows marijuana on an island the law does not set foot on. Testifying in his own defence, he turns to the jury and tells them that if they convict him he will get every one of them. They convict him, then cannot agree on death, and he gets life. Nine years later he is paroled, and jurors begin to die. The juror of the title is Miss Callie Ruffin, the first Black person seated on a Ford County jury, a woman who raised eight children and saw seven of them take doctorates. Her weekly lunches with Willie are the spine of the book far more than the killings are.

It reads less like a legal thriller than like a portrait of a small Mississippi town over a decade: school integration, the slow work of turning a bankrupt paper into a going concern, the obituaries the Times became known for. The reservation is the shape. The trial finishes early, the killings start very late, and the long middle is Willie getting older while Clanton changes around him. Anyone who picks it up for the courtroom will spend most of the book somewhere else.