Book ~ "The Widow" (2025) John Grisham

From Goodreads ~ Simon Latch is a lawyer in rural Virginia, making just enough to pay his bills while his marriage slowly falls apart. Then into his office walks Eleanor Barnett, an elderly widow in need of a new will. Apparently, her husband left her a small fortune and no one knows about it. 

Once he hooks the richest client of his career, Simon works quietly to keep her wealth under the radar. But soon her story begins to crack. When she is hospitalized after a car accident, Simon realizes that nothing is as it seems and he finds himself on trial for a crime he swears he didn’t commit: murder. 

Simon knows he’s innocent. But he also knows the circumstantial evidence is against him and he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. To save himself, he must find the real killer. 

Simon is a small-town lawyer in rural Virginia barely keeping his life together ... his marriage is over, his finances are a mess, he has a gambling problem and his career feels stuck. Then Eleanor Barnett, an elderly widow, walks into his office and becomes the most interesting client he’s ever had. She wants to redo her will and hints that she has a huge secret fortune. Simon thinks he’s finally caught a break and befriends her. But the more he gets involved in her life, the stranger things get. Eleanor has secrets, her family is complicated, she won't reveal her true assets and nothing about her past adds up. She has no one else so Simon ends up doing everything for her.

Then Eleanor ends up in a serious car accident and dies of what they suspect is pneumonia but is determined to not be. Suddenly Simon is in the middle of a murder investigation. Everyone’s pointing fingers and most of the clues seem to point to him. To clear his name, Simon has to dig into Eleanor’s hidden life and figure out who actually had something to gain from her death. What starts as rewriting a will turns into a messy, twisty mystery full of money, lies and people who aren’t at all what they seem.

It's been almost 10 years since I've read a John Grisham novel and I thought this one was okay. It was a bit long and draggy. It's written in third person perspective, usually with Simon being the focus. I found Simon to be very unlikable so it was hard to cheer for him after Eleanor died and his life got even worse. I wasn't buying the ending ... it came out of nowhere and was a disappointment considering the time I'd put into reading the book.