REVIEW John Grisham fine-tunes his prose for legal thriller 'The Last Juror'

Some of the characters are one-sided, but the book is still enjoyable.
By MARTA SALIJ
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"The Last Juror," by John Grisham (Doubleday, $27.95)
"The Last Juror" is the best John Grisham novel yet.
And I don't count myself a Grisham fan. He's too heavy-handed for me, too eager to clobber readers with his points, and there's some of that obviousness in his 17th novel.
But his forays into other kinds of fiction, such as last year's "Bleachers," and "Skipping Christmas" and "A Painted House" before that, have taught him well. He's honed his prose and his plotting to create an entirely enjoyable legal thriller this time out.
The setting is again Ford County, Miss., first seen in Grisham's first thriller, "A Time to Kill," recently re-released. The narrator is Willie Traynor, a young white man from up north -- Memphis -- who comes to tiny Clanton to be the reporter on the weekly newspaper and ends up buying it out of bankruptcy with his grandmother's money.
So Willie is now the editor and publisher of the Ford County Times, in spite of having no experience in journalism save for a few classes he sleepwalked through. Seldom has a young man been so smugly self-satisfied with his place in the world, as Willie vows to be the kind of trailblazing, fearless newspaperman they write novels about.
Then Willie gets very lucky, at least if you're the editor of a weekly newspaper. A young widow is raped and murdered by a man she'd spurned. Terrible thing, but think of the headlines!
Luckily for Willie -- and Grisham -- the killer is one of the no-good, mean-as-a-snake Padgitts who have been buying off sheriffs and mayors since before Prohibition. The Padgitts will stop at nothing to get the accused Danny Padgitt off, a point Grisham makes with more force than needed.
Endearing friendship
Meanwhile, Willie has struck up a friendship with Callie Ruffin, a remarkable middle-aged black woman in town who's raised eight children, seven of whom are now college professors. The friendship between Willie and Callie is tender and enriching, the best part of "The Last Juror."
Grisham misses on a few points with his latest. Must the Padgitts be so obviously evil? Must Callie be so obviously good? And is there anyone who hasn't figured out who "The Last Juror" is by page 100?
The last half of the book hinges on Danny Padgitt's courtroom vow to get every one of the jurors who finally convict him of murder.
Hard-core Grisham fans will be thrilled with "The Last Juror," but anyone who's been on the fence about the perennial best seller king ought to give him another try.