(Segregation, too: when Brigance invites Lang's 25-year-old daughter, Portia, home to dinner, he realises she is the first black person ever to have eaten in his house.) Coming so close on the heels of last year's The Racketeer, however, Sycamore Row can't help but disappoint.

He has produced a solid courtroom thriller with plenty to say about the long half-life of prejudice in the deep south. Grisham's decision to revive Brigance after almost 25 years and write what amounts to a historical novel is intriguing. As one character observes: 'Ethics are determined by what they catch you doing.' Grisham has no more time than the creator of Jarndyce v Jarndyce would have had for a judicial system that allows straightforward trials to become feeding frenzies, where sharp practice and techniques such as 'deposition warfare', in which lawyers with their meters running peck away at witnesses for hours, are shrugged off as part of the game. If the division-of-estate plot lends Sycamore Row Shakespearean gravitas (Lang becomes Hubbard's proxy third child – a Cordelia who loves according to her bond and yet is rewarded), then the multiple-will twist is self-consciously Dickensian. But before he can represent the estate in what promises to be a gladiatorial trial by jury, Brigance must decode him, and fast. Its existence raises questions about Hubbard's 'testamentary capacity' in his final months – was he out of it on Demerol? Hubbard was such an enigma that inferring any kind of motive is tricky. Just to complicate matters, there is another will – a more conventional one, that rewards the children and excludes Lang.

Sycamore tree john grisham