In this book, there is more courthouse drama than the last one. By the time the first sight of the “thrill” came, I wasn’t very interested in the book. This book unfortunately started out on a slow, tedious note. It was a bang-on beginning and the interest in the pursuit of justice never wavered from that.

If the pace at the start is good, and you are drawn into the thrill of the novel, a couple of boring parts in between are ignorable because you have the thrill aspect from earlier to keep you going on.

I think the main necessity to any type of thriller is pace. He’s the appointed executor of the will, who is chosen by the rich guy Seth Hubbard. And who defends Lettie? Why, our protagonist Mr. White lawyers, prominent ones, are ready to defend the children and stop Lettie from becoming the richest black woman in the county. And voila, the racist Ford County starts to raise their heads at the “injustice”. That will, a holographic one, doesn’t give them a dime, but gives most of the inheritance to a maid, Lettie Lang, who is black. So far, it seems like an open and shut case, right? The twist is that the kids aren’t part of his last will and testament. His children, who haven’t visited him in years, materialize to claim their share of his land and money. He does so keeping in mind a lot of things, and with Ford County not knowing much of his life or his family, the suicide becomes the cynosure. So other than character sketches of these returning characters, Sycamore Row is a book you can read as a standalone novel. There are other returning characters of course, but the story of A Time to Kill doesn’t continue here. Is Sycamore Row a sequel to A Time to Kill, or a standalone second book that features some of the characters who were prominent in the first book? I feel it is more of the latter than the former, but it is a sequel in the sense that it continues the theme of racism and the defense of blacks by white attorney Jake Brigance. I wasn’t wrong in my understanding of course, but just wanted to clarify. I checked out the definition of the word once I started reading Sycamore Row.

Grisham sycamore row review