The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town - John Grisham

Written by John Grisham
Read by Craig Wasson
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date: October 10, 2006
Duration: 12:29:15

In the town of Ada, Oklahoma, Ron Williamson was going to be the next Mickey Mantle. In the major league draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the State of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A’s, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory.

But on his way to the Big Leagues, Ron stumbled, his dreams broken by drinking, drugs, and women. Then, on a winter night in 1982, not far from Ron’s home, a young cocktail waitress named Debra Sue Carter was savagely murdered. The investigation led nowhere. Until, on the flimsiest evidence, it led to Ron Williamson. The washed-up small-town hero was charged, tried, and sentenced to death—in a trial littered with lying witnesses and tainted evidence that would shatter a man’s already broken life, and let a true killer go free.

Impeccably researched, grippingly told, filled with eleventh-hour drama, this audio edition of The Innocent Man reads like an edge-of-your-seat legal thriller. It is a book no American can afford to miss.

Review …John Grisham steps back from his tried-and-true courtroom dramas with this look at a real-life murder. Actor Craig Wasson narrates the story of ill-fated loser Ron Williamson, the man that a pair of small-town police detectives are convinced raped and murdered a young woman in 1982. Wasson is straightforward in his reading, seldom letting out the actor within. And like a newspaper reporter, Grisham uses a bare-bones factual approach that lacks the twists and turns of his novels. The listener will be outraged by the frailties of the criminal justice system portrayed, which is not as malleable as its fictitious counterparts, and more prone to error. Reality ain’t pretty. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

John Grisham made a YouTube video interview when the book was first issued to tell why he wrote his only non-fiction book.