My son listened to this on Audible and recommended it to me. I had just finished The Nightingale and wanted something very different and a bit lighter so it was good timing.
This novel takes place in Mississippi and tells the story of two families on the Gulf Coast over the course of generations, from the immigrant grandparents through the third generation. In Biloxi, unlike the rest of the State, booze, gambling and girls seem to dominate the moral code, along with the Dixie Mafia, who controls most of the underworld. The local police and politicians are customers, who tend to look the other way in enforcing the criminal law and often are the ones enabling the bad conduct. We meet the Rudy's (Jesse and his son Keith) and the Malcos (Lance and his son Hugh). The boys grow up in post ww2 America and start along very different paths even while young. Jesse, Keith's father, works during the day and goes to law school at night, eventually becoming the local DA while Lance assumes control as the head of the local crime machine, running the seedier parts of town. Keith and Hugh are following in their father's footsteps, putting the families on a collision course.
This moved fairly quickly, but you don't really get much insight into the characters. The narration feels more like reading a news story about these two families and Grisham doesn't really go into the feelings or thoughts of the characters all that much. Biloxi, Parchman prison and the environs are so richly described it's like you are transported to that area during the time period in the book. I think that the themes involved things like capital punishment, retribution and moral turpitude, but I didn't generally feel that Grisham got as deep into those themes as he had in books such as A Time to Kill. Generally, though, the book was entertaining, just don't expect too much from it.
