John Grisham's 'Confession' lives up to hype

"THE CONFESSION," by John Grisham, Doubleday, 432 pages, $28.95 (f)

For more than 20 years, author John Grisham has been delighting fans with his legal yarns.

"The Confession," his latest novel, is no exception.

Donté Drumm, a local black football star, has been sentenced to die. All of his appeals have been denied, and time is running out.

Travis Boyette, a white man who has made a career out of raping and abusing women, has just gotten out of prison, taking up residence in a halfway house in Kansas.

One man is innocent, the other is guilty.

No one would ever have made the connection between their two stories, but then, that's the way Travis wanted it — until now.

Donté is on death row in Texas, found guilty of abducting, raping and strangling a high school cheerleader that he had gone to school with. His confession was coerced, the evidence circumstantial and witnesses unbelievable, but still he was convicted.

Nine years later, Donté and his supporters are counting down the days until his execution.

Travis has just been paroled for a different crime. He is suffering from an inoperable brain tumor and decides to do what's right and confess — to murdering the cheerleader in Texas. In 1998, he'd buried her body so that it would never be found, and then watched in amazement as an innocent Donté, whom he'd never met, took the fall.

Or so Travis says. Who's really going to believe the confession of such an unsavory fellow? It turns out things aren't as black and white as people would like to believe.

Like all of Grisham's books, "The Confession" seems to follow a pattern, which is fine in this case, because it works.

The novel has a documentary feel to it, looking at a number of viewpoints and neatly summarizing and binding them together. It makes it less than the "thriller" it's being promoted as and more of an intense mystery or drama.

There are a number of story lines here, and for the most part, Grisham ties up all the loose ends. Though readers will leave the book questioning Travis' motives.

Those small details aside, "The Confession" is a driving novel that lives up to the hype preceding its release.

e-mail: jharrison@desnews.com