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The Confession: A Novel
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The Confession: A Novel
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The Confession: A Novel
Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

The Confession: A Novel

Written by John Grisham

Narrated by Scott Sowers

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

An innocent man is about to be executed.
Only a guilty man can save him.
For every innocent man sent to prison, there is a guilty one left on the outside. He doesn't understand how the police and prosecutors got the wrong man, and he certainly doesn't care. He just can't believe his good luck. Time passes and he realizes that the mistake will not be corrected: the authorities believe in their case and are determined to get a conviction. He may even watch the trial of the person wrongly accused of his crime. He is relieved when the verdict is guilty. He laughs when the police and prosecutors congratulate themselves. He is content to allow an innocent person to go to prison, to serve hard time, even to be executed.
Travis Boyette is such a man. In 1998, in the small East Texas city of Sloan, he abducted, raped, and strangled a popular high school cheerleader. He buried her body so that it would never be found, then watched in amazement as police and prosecutors arrested and convicted Donté Drumm, a local football star, and marched him off to death row.
Now nine years have passed. Travis has just been paroled in Kansas for a different crime; Donté is four days away from his execution. Travis suffers from an inoperable brain tumor. For the first time in his miserable life, he decides to do what's right and confess.
But how can a guilty man convince lawyers, judges, and politicians that they're about to execute an innocent man?

From the Hardcover edition.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 26, 2010
ISBN9780739376188
Unavailable
The Confession: A Novel

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Reviews for The Confession

Rating: 3.698294289339019 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

938 ratings98 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent but sad. Heart wrenching when Roberta is washing her son's body.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read this when it first came out and enjoyed it. I am not going to write a full review now as I would not be able to do it justice.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Grisham always is good, but I was hesitant to continue reading this book because it seemed so slow starting. I was about 150 pages into it when I realized I was hooked. This story about the death sentence is intriguing. Makes a strong, strong case against putting people to death, even for the most heinous crimes. Grisham emphasizes the anti-death penalty point of view, but he ignores the argument for death. When there is absolutely no doubt that a person is a killer, why should society continue to pay to support him/her for the rest of her/his life? The biblical injunction against killing jiust does not seem sufficient when we face some of the most horrible killers in history.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Not much to say about this one really. It started out like one of his earlier books and then just started to go down hill. There was just so much useless detail and I found myself doing a lot of skimming.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Not Grisham's finest, but the man can write a good story. Unfortunately here, he gets really preachy in his loathing of the death penalty (and Texas). Consequently, the characters stop being interesting and become mere voices for his talking points. Corruption, yes, racial prejudice, certainly, but reducing the principal characters to all good and all bad doesn't make great reading. An okay beach read and that's about it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very interesting. The main body of the book was Grisham at his absolute best. Just when you thought the story was going to end (Wait! what are all these extra pages?)... he took you beyond the end of the story, and you realized that this was what you were waiting for. Then, when you though the story would REALLY end (but there are still more pages?) Grisham got a bit preachy and political, but in such a way that it was totally in keeping with the book.

    Well done.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This could have been an interesting subject but the book was too predictable. At some point I realized that I didn't like any of the characters and didn't care what they did or what happened to them.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    John Grisham's diatribe against (1) the death penalty (DP) and (2) Texas.The problem with political and religious diatribes pretending to be novels is that the plots are obvious from the beginning and the characters have the depth and color of monochromatic paper-dolls. The characters in The Confession are not monochromatic paper-dolls because paper-dolls are two dimensional and these characters are one dimensional. Grisham hates the DP and his 'proof' is that in a state where every single public official is totally corrupt, i.e. Texas, it is possible that an innocent person may be convicted and executed.Well, duh? A valid 'proof' against the DP would not be a novel but a history of the DP along with a cogent argument that even the worst offender in history, e.g. Himmler, should be spared. The story centers on a black high school football player who was convicted of murdering a white high school cheerleader--although no body was found and only one girl was missing. But then, just before the sentence is to be carried out, a low life, who is dying of cancer, confesses to the main character. The MC is a lawyer--of course--who tries to get a stay of execution in time to dig up the body. [Warning: Plot spoiler next sentence.] He fails because every official in Texas, including the Federal judges, is totally corrupt and also a white supremacist, anti-black racist. Grisham tries but fails to make this believable. The Pope has a better argument against the DP. You may google it online. But the Pope doesn't hate Texas. So if you hate Texas and the DP, you might enjoy this book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    excellent portrayal of a judicial system, hopefully not a true portrayal of the Texas system.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the few books that actually made me cry. Great writing as always.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Grisham's usual page-turner, this one focuses on the human cost of capital punishment in Texas especially of the innocent, The main character, a Lutheran minister, drawn into the case almost by chance, is sympathetically drawn.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I thought this was one of the best Grisham novels since his early classics like A Time to Kill and The Chamber. Like those, this deals with weighty issues such as racism in the criminal justice system and in American society more generally, and the principles behind and application of the death penalty. The plot concerns the nine year imprisonment of a young black man Donte Drumm, after a confession is forced out of him to having murdered his white girlfriend. The action of the story concerns the confession of the real killer in the days leading up Drumm's execution date and the frantic efforts to save the latter from being executed for a crime he did not commit. It's gripping stuff and a great liberal novel, though perhaps not handled with quite the delicacy of those earlier classics.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    The problem with reading clubs is that occasionally someone suggests a dud and one feels forced to finish the book out of courtesy to the other participants. That's what happened here.

    I abhor the death penalty. I approve of Grisham's message 100%, but my goodness this book is repetitive and tedious. Not to mention I felt bruised and battered by being hit over the head constantly by the message. I listened to it and found the FF button to be incredibly useful. The irony was I could fast forward 15 minutes and think I hadn't moved forward at all. The characters are stereotypical cardboard cutouts. Their speeches (they don't talk, they proclaim,) are all cookie-cutter, but the dough gets stale quickly. The book would have been much stronger had there been some shades of gray, some ethical tensions. There just are none here.

    For example, did the prosecutors and cops set out to kill an innocent man? Of course, not. They were subject to cultural, racial, and political pressures. An examination of the force of those pressures would have made a much more interesting book. And what if there had been no confession? How about an examination of the legal hurdles that prevent uncovering police malfeasance? Or an examination of the Supreme Court's reasoning that innocence is not a defense? (See Connick v Thomson.) To quote Reason Magazine: "Scalia has written in the past that there's nothing in the Constitution to prevent the government from executing an innocent person. He also apparently believes there's no duty for the government to preserve or turn over evidence that would prove a person's innocence. Finally, from Connick we learn he also believes that prosecutors and municipalities shouldn't be held liable to people who are wrongly convicted and imprisoned, either, even if prosecutors knowingly concealed the evidence that would have exonerated them." Now *that* would have made a fascinating book.

    I don't like giving negative ratings and usually don't review books I didn't like, but in this case I resent the time spent listening to this; it was like trying to move through quicksand. Be interesting to see what the rest of the group thinks, especially since they are a particularly high-minded literary group.

    Do you suppose the moderator got it wrong and it should have been Augustine's Confessions?

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The Confession? Worth a read but not in the John Grisham league. Would have thought he'd have the experience not to stretch this one as far as he did. The cover notes tell the whole story really
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Ehhh. It wasn't my favorite Grisham. I really enjoyed parts 1 & 2, but part three was just so explicationexplicationexplication. I had to really push myself through it. Additionally, I don't love when I feel like an author's using a book as a political tract (whether I agree or not), so the end just left me feeling very blah.

    That said, I usually really like Grisham's writing, and more than half the book was up to his usual standard and held my interest really well. So 3 stars.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    More standard Grisham, although this novel does have a twist to it. The feel is familiar, and the legal arguments abundant. There are humorous moments as well as sad ones. All in all, it's an enjoyable weekend read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Sometimes I get a book that touches a subject that is large in my environment, and this book is just that. Currently, there are two death penalty cases in my state and it is making me examine my feeling on executing a murderer. My head knows the death penalty is only a deterrent to the convicted person but it is a permanent one. My heart doesn't want to think about death, mine or anyone else's. In this book, the convicted man is not guilty, but is executed anyway. The guilty man confesses right before the execution is scheduled, but he isn't believed until after he takes people to the body. Even with this, nothing changes. The state will not stop putting people on death row. As usual, John Grisham writes an riveting issue story. But so did Erle Stanley Garner in his Perry Mason series.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book contains John Grisham's comments against (1) the death penalty and (2) Texas. Some may say that it's impossible, that a set of circumstances could conspire to enable a state to put an innocent man to death. Why? the multiple characters were well developed and contributed to the theme. As a non legal person, I'm amazed at his insights and happy that I've not tangled with the US legal system. The book was a page turner and burner.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    grisham at his best. wher does he keep finding the material ? Time to buy books and complete my Grisham collection
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    From the very first sentences I knew that this book would be a quick read as I was drawn ever deeper into the world of Texas Justice and death row. The imminent death of a convicted murderer and the unlikely characters who aim to save his life make this intriguing story one which keeps the reader up late at night wanting to turn the next page to discover what happens next.

    While this is a wonderful work of fiction, the harsh reality of life is that many convicted murderers claim innocence. Some are. Society needs to make sure that the convicted person is, in fact, guilty of the crime for which they have been convicted.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I didn't like this one as well as some of his others, but it wasn't horrible.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The storyline is completely boring, pointless, and unsatisfying. I'd give it one star, but Grisham still knows how to write, he's just apparently forgotten that he needs a good story too.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I thoroughly enjoyed this Grisham novel. Know going in that this book has a bias against the death penalty. I noticed that many people were perturbed by this and also felt that this was a soap box novel. I wasn't bothered by any of these aspects. This was one of the better Grisham novel for several reasons.

    Usually, his novels run 300 pages and at times have ended abruptly. Grisham did not limit himself this time and the story unfolded over 515 pages. The size was necessary to the story and had he tried to edit it to less pages and words, I think the telling of the story would have suffered.

    In this book, unlike others, there were a few more twists and I would say, more of a realistic reflection on what happens. The day was not saved. An innocent man was put to death despite the race against time in the first third of the book. There were also some story lines that were set up and got you thinking that something might happen that did not play out. A little bit of mystery.

    There were a lot of characters - more than the average for one of his novels. Paths converged but there were enough characters that left you with some to like and to some to hate and some not to feel anything about. Like many books, there were a few things that happened that were either unbelievable or unlikely but these did not detract from the bigger story.

    Having worked for many years in the legal business I enjoyed the truth of justice not being black and white. I also enjoyed the truth that there are a lot of corrupt people in this business. Many cops, many attorneys and many judges. Don't be fooled into thinking idealistically about those who are supposed to uphold the law. More often than not, they are driven by self interest and politics, egotistical narcissism and corruption. The bigger the legal issue, the more likely to find these qualities and they were all in display in The Confession.

    Grisham is my little escape between other reads because I know it will be a fast read and I will be fully engaged. 48 hours well spent. If you can enjoy a biased opinion on the death penalty, you will probably really enjoy this book. If an opinion that doesn't jive with yours drives you crazy - give this one a miss and read The Firm. It's my other favorite Grisham.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    rabck from southernfryed; Wow. A book that leaves you with a lot to think about. Very good, until the last chapter which tied things in a bow too quickly and nicely. Donte is convicted of murdering a white girl, based on his coerced confession. Just days before his execution in Texas, a convict on parole walks into a Lutheran pastors office and says that he did the crime, not Donte, and he wants to make things right. They finally set off on a madcap rush to Texas, so the man can file an affidavit with Donte's lawyer, but it's too late. The governor ignored the video (suppressed by his staffers), the circuit judge closes his office exactly at 5p to play golf, despite knowing this appeal is coming in, the detective swears the confession was not coerced, and the execution of an innocent black man sparks major unrest in the town. Eventually, the true killer leads Donte's lawyer to the body and Donte's is exonerated...after he's dead. I particularly liked the views throughout the book from the pastor, Keith, as he wrestles with something he hadn't really thought through before - What give us the right to kill in the name of justice? Ever? The book affecting me powerfully in getting me to really think about my own position on the death penalty - and if it ever should be used.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Now, most of know how execution-happy Texas is, but the circumstances defining the plot of this book are rather far-fetched, even if racist crazies get their way. The prosecutor is having an affair with the judge. There Is no physical evidence, only a confession obtained under duress (and the record of it is not remotely convincing at that as the interrogator is prompting him for certain "facts" that was said incorrectly. A phone call long after the murder by a classmate who has an axe to grind, bearing false testimony. The testimony of a "jailhouse snitch" who says what he is told to say in return for a lighter sentence. It's outrageous that anyone in modern times (and this is set in modern-day Texas) would be convicted by a jury (made partial by the judge/prosecutor relationship) would even be convicted in this circumstance, let alone given the death penalty. Even more outlandish is appeals all along the way did not stop this travesty. In spite of a ludicrous premise, Grisham puts enough effort into the characters to save the book. The real killer identifies himself at the 11th hour to a priest in Kansas, who decides he needs to make an effort to save the wrongfully-convicted prisoner on the eve of his execution. The priest, the killer, the defense lawyer are all well-done characters. The governor in particular is such a despicable person that true hatred develops as the story goes on. While the premise is implausible, characterization and related events seem to be authentic within its context.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A great book by Grisham. He has an authentic way of making the reader feel the emotions that the characters are portraying - I felt the hurriedness of the moments as people were trying to save the life of a man on death row, the conflictions of the preacher, etc. I also felt heartbreak for some and disgust for others. Incredible book that makes you consider your thoughts on the justice system and the death penalty. Recommend!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    John Grisham once again earns points in becoming my favorite writer of suspense.

    "The Confession" (my first e-book read on my iPad) is another story of what Grisham does so well, a solid story, the self centered acts of those in power, and the suffering plight of those who are the victims of those power."

    Within the opening pages I was drawn into a 'can't put down' story. Though I was able to see what the final outcome of the primary plot was early on, that did not dilute the suspense.

    Grisham tells his stories without a bunch of 'who cares' and 'what does this have to do with the story' spots that add a bunch of pages that I can do without.

    The closing the book or in this the turning off of the iPad it earns a favorite from me and if your a reader of suspense, you too will likely add "The Confession" to your list of favorites .
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Although a work of fiction, this book greatly changed my view on capital punishment. For most of my life I have been pro death penalty. Living in Texas, I was proud to know that my state took a tough stand with zero tolerance against hardened criminals. As a result of this book, I now strongly doubt the integrity of the justice system and the effectiveness of capital punishment. If even one person is wrongly convicted and put to death, then the system has failed and must be carefully reexamined and possibly reformed. If one innocent person is put to death, then we ourselves become the criminal. And, those who are correctly convicted and placed on death row are not given a second chance to be redeemed with an opportunity of becoming a good citizen. Instead, they are whisked away to prison, ultimately stuck onto a gurney and put to death like some useless piece of trash. However, Christ redeemed the lost, the sick, and even hardened criminals. Should we should not emulate Him?One thing I don't like about Grisham is his biased tilt to the left, always critical of those on the right. And, this showed in this book. All churchgoers are arms-bearing, Republican, death penalty, rednecks. And those on the left are the ONLY ones who take up the cause for the weak and take a stand against the death penalty. Why can't we keep this an unbiased story? Do we really have to be so polarized? Why can't we work together on these and other issues and seek reconciliation for the good of our common man? I believe someday we can and will.If you can read past the political rhetoric I believe this can be one of Grisham's best books yet. I highly recommend it. Full of suspense and mystery with never a dull moment. And I hope it truly speaks to those who are pro capital punishment and will seek the will to change the system.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Firstly let me state that I am a huge fan of Grisham and have read virtually all of his books. However IMHO this is not one of his best.Like others I loved the first two thirds of the book as we see the race to save Donte Drumm from execution for a crime he did not commit, a crime apportioned to him mainly because of the colour of his skin. The whites in the town needed someone to punish and if he happens to be black then all the better all this despite the fact that there no body and as such no certainty that a crime had even been committed.As usual Grisham does not bother too much about character development but the story is fast paced and is a page turner. However, once Donte is executed the book becomes more of a soapbox for Grisham's own political leanings (anyone whose has read An Innocent Man) will recognise them: anti-death penalty, lazy and corrupt police and judiciary, and racial inequality within the American legal system. From this point on the story, although still readable, rather loses steam and with it it's punch. A good read but not one of his best.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very good throughout.