My daughter and I always like to listen to Audible books on long trips.  This year’s 4000 mile round trip to Yellowstone gave us a chance to get two books in—one really good, one really bad.  Despite his fame, John Grisham’s The Widow was really bad.  Really.  I used to like his writing.  But lately he’s just been phoning it in.  

The Widow is a lazy piece of writing.  It features hundreds of paragraphs that don’t go anywhere.  In a book that is supposed to be about a murder—the reader would expect suspense.  But Grisham throws in so much extraneous material that he kills the suspense.  

The murder doesn’t occur until the second half of the book.  A rich widow is the victim, and her lawyer is accused (you find that out in the book’s blurb) but by the time she gets killed, you don’t even care—she has been irritating you for several hundred pages.  (Since we listened on Audible—I’m not sure how many pages exactly she had been bothering us.)  And when the lawyer gets arrested, he is such a slimeball that you figure he deserves a little prison time—just for being himself.

Grisham’s writing wanders, then meanders, then goes down rabbit holes, then conjures material that belongs on the cutting room floor, then gets stuck on characters you wish you could get away from—then repeats all those mistakes. 

Add to that a reader that overperforms, has no idea how to convey female voices, and makes so many characters sound the same that you aren’t sure who is doing the talking.

We listened to this on the way back from Yellowstone, and it made eastern Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa seem very long.