A Wanted Man: The Fugitive (Theodore Boone) by John Grisham

Theo was standing in the middle of the subway car, with Chase and April close by.

A man seated tightly between two women lowered his newspaper as he flipped a page. He looked familiar, oddly familiar.

Theo wiggled a few feet closer. He'd seen that face before, but where? Maybe the hair was darker, maybe the reading glasses were new. Suddenly, it struck Theo like a brick against the head. The face belonged to Pete Duffy.

Pete Duffy! The most wanted man in the history of Strattenburg. Number seven on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted.

Theo Boone's class trip to Washington, D.C., is quickly forgotten as he realizes whom he's seeing. Quickly Theo pulls out his iPhone, and pretending to play a game, manages to video the man, zooming in closely as the guy folds his newspaper and gets up to get off the Metro at the next station. Leaving his classmates on the subway, Theo follows the suspect as he exits and stays behind him several blocks until he loses him in the crowd.

Theodore Boone, kid lawyer, has more than a citizen's duty at stake here. He and Duffy have a long history. Pete Duffy had been indicted for the strangling of his wife through Theo's behind-the-scenes location of a secret witness who saw the accused don a golf glove on his right hand and enter his own house adjoining the golf course and then bury both gloves deep in a rubbish bin, but Duffy had jumped bail before conviction and disappeared months ago.

Theo knows he has to do something. He calls his Uncle Ike, disbarred lawyer and family black sheep, who flies to Washington, and in disguise joins Theo on the subway in surveillance for the fugitive, finally calling in the FBI. But Duffy doesn't show, and it is not until Theo and Uncle Ike are heading home at the airport that Theo literally bumps into the fugitive.

"Sorry," Theo mumbled. Then he froze, but remembered Agent Frye's warning, "Don't stare."

He called Agent Slade and started following Duffy, now with blond hair and different glasses, down the concourse at a distance.

"I got "Packer!" he whispered into his phone.

And that's just the beginning of John Grisham's fourth book in his Theodore Boone series, Theodore Boone: the Fugitive (Dutton Books, 2015). The FBI agents collar Duffy boarding a plane to Brazil, and he is returned to Theo's hometown for retrial, now also indicted for fleeing the law. But Duffy's murder conviction hangs on the testimony of illegal immigrant Bobby Escobar, and Bobby is reasonably afraid to testify for fear of deportation or, worse, murder by Duffy's accomplices, and Theo, too, is afraid for his own and Bobby's safety.

When the best-selling John Grisham puts out an adult or junior novel, the reader knows he's going to get an edge-of-seat, too-fast-to-blink page turner, and Grisham definitely delivers in his new fourth book in the popular "kid lawyer" series. Grisham's middle-reader thrillers enjoy the same virtues and vices as his adult literature, and a fast-paced crime novel that is hard to put down is pretty much guaranteed and delivered in the opening chapters of this tale. But Grisham has a lot of backstory to pack into this one, and in the second part, his writing seems rushed as he pivots into the rest of the exposition and builds a different sort of suspense to get to the climactic trial scene, adding a few more improbable details to get where he wants to go. But, hey! Who really cares, as Grisham brings it all down to the denouement, as Duffy is sent to the slammer for life--or not, if the author doesn't retire his intrepid eighth-grade sleuth, Theo, the up-dated Nancy Drew of his time.

Like the young reader eco-thrillers of his contemporary Carl Hiaasen, Grisham's books offer sophisticated, witty, and realistic kid characters who manage to deal with adult matters with plenty of cool. Recommended even for the reluctant reader, this one should pair well with Dave Barry's hilarious new best-seller for kids, The Worst Class Trip Ever (See review here.) Although this fourth Theo Boone tale stands well alone, readers won't want miss the earlier books in the series, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, Theodore Boone: The Accused, Theodore Boone: the Abduction,
and Theodore Boone: the Activist.

Juvenile Justice: Theodore Boone, Kid Lawyer by John Grisham

Theo Boone knew of no other kid who hung around a law office every day after school. Most of his friends were playing baseball or soccer, or hanging around the house waiting on dinner. And there he was sitting in a dark law library pondering the events of the past hour.

He loved the place--the rich smell of worn leather and old rugs and dusty law books. The air of importance.

How could it be that he, Theodore Boone, of all the people in Strattenburg, knew the truth about the Duffy murder?

Starry-eyed young athletes whose field of daydreams has them becoming football or basketball or baseball greats abound in children's lit. There are even some notable kid detectives who dream of following Sherlock into great careers in crime-solving. But a boy barrister wannabe who longs for a life in a dusty law library and a role in the thick of courtroom drama?

Apparently not the impossible dream for John Grisham, best-selling author of legal thrillers, who has turned his considerable storytelling talents to writing for the children's and young adult market in his latest Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer (Dutton, 2010).

Theo Boone is the only son of two workaholic lawyers, one who maintains his own "of-counsel" office in his parents' building and already has built up a substantial, if non-paying, clientele among his junior high friends who need legal advice. When a notorious murder trial begins in the local courthouse, Theo is in jurisprudence paradise, even negotiating an all-day field trip with family friend Judge Gantry for his government class to observe the opening day of the proceedings. The kids all agree that the defendant, admittedly in financial straits, is guilty of the strangulation death of his wife to collect her million-dollar insurance policy, but there is no physical evidence at the site and the accused was seen playing golf alone at the time of the assault at the nearby Waverly Creek course. Experienced court watcher Theo has to point out that the prosecutor's case is weak and that defendant Peter Duffy will likely walk.

But then classmate Julio Pena approaches Theo and privately confides that his cousin, an illegal alien groundskeeper at the Waverly golf court, is sure that he saw Duffy speed up on a cart, carefully draw on both golfing gloves, enter the murder house and leave hastily ten minutes later.

Julio begs Theo to intervene with his friend Judge Gantry to stop the murderer from going free without revealing the cousin's identity. But Theo knows that with the trial already moving swiftly to the deliberative phase, he is going to have to have more definitive evidence before Judge Gantry will declare a mistrial. Torn between his promise to Julio to protect his cousin from jailing and deportation and his own responsibility to avert a grievous miscarriage of justice, Theo realizes that this time he must make a judicious decision that will change several lives.

Grisham's forte is, of course, fast-paced, page-turning storytelling which incorporates both investigation and courtroom drama into the plot, and the best-selling author uses this same formula to good effect in his first effort directed to the kid marketplace. Unlike his 2005 adult thriller, The Client, which featured a young fugitive as a principal character, however, this novel falls a little short in full character development. Major and minor characters are sketched out in typically skillful but broad strokes, with Theo's parents drawn pretty much to type and the middle school milieu given fairly short shrift. In this regard John Grisham could take some valuable lessons from children's writers, who often show great talent for building page-turning plots around believable young characters of some depth and complexity--especially from his fellow adult mystery authors, notably Robert B. Parker (Edenville Owls and The Boxer and the Spy) and the Newbery-winning Carl Hiaasen (Hoot, Flush, and Scat), whose crossover ventures into children's literature have been memorable.

Still a young hero who specializes in one of the thinking professions is a promisingly novel role model for middle readers, and Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer shows real potential as an ongoing series hero if John Grisham chooses to focus his lucrative storytelling skills toward the young adult genre. With the late Robert B. Parker regrettably out of the game and the best-selling Harry Potter and Percy Jackson as powerful boy protagonists pulling in the readers, it's a fertile field with a long tail of sales just waiting for Grisham to jump in with both feet.

Making the Grade: The Scandal by John Grisham

Theo tucked himself into his sleeping bag, warm and comfortable.

He was thirteen and unwilling to grow older. The entire week had been about the future, about testing for placement in high school and the mysteries of ninth grade. Theo liked where he was in life. He loved camping, he liked his school and friends and teachers. He liked being a boy on a bike, zipping around town. If he got into trouble his excuse was always, "Hey, I'm just a kid."

Why couldn't a kid stay thirteen forever?

But time and tide wait for no kid, and when the ever-optimistic Theo's test score misses the benchmark for high school honors classes by one point, he finds himself unwillingly in the middle of the simmering issue of state-mandated tests and college-track exams for eighth graders. And then his best friend April drops a bomb on him.

"I have something to show you," she says. "I couldn't sleep, so I decided to do this. She reached into her backpack and removed a plain white envelope. "Just read it." Theo removed a letter:

To Dr. Carmen Stoop, Superintendent of Strattenbury City Schools

I am a concerned citizen. The rise in scores at East Middle School is very impressive. But you should know the real story, On the Saturday after the tests, a group of eighth-grade teachers met at the school and behind a locked door began replacing wrong answers with correct ones....

Suddenly, Theo finds himself in an ethical dilemma. As the son of two lawyers, the complete kid insider at the local courthouse, he has become the de facto "kid lawyer" for his classmates, but Theo can't help wishing April had never written that letter or "consulted" him about her involvement in the scandal. And when the school system examines the actual tests, they find clear evidence of substantial tampering. As the news of scandal spreads through town and the controversy widens to the validity of state testing to determine placement in classes at high school becomes fierce, April is seized with whistle blower's remorse. And yet she has a point: if cheating at East Middle can put certain students unfairly into the magic top ten percent, aren't students like Theo and herself being cheated out of the best classes and teachers at high school? Is using one test to lock the other students out of advanced high school classes even fair? And then, has an actual felony been committed by the guilty teachers?

And when Theo's parents take on the defense of the five accused teachers, the usually cheeky Theo finds himself a somewhat unwilling insider and potential witness, in John Grisham's latest in series, Theodore Boone: The Scandal (Dutton Books, 2016). Although this latest in Grisham's Theodore Booneseries lacks the danger of investigating a murder, rescuing a kidnap victim, or helping the FBI capture a killer as he did in earlier books, the subject of mandated testing is one in which his 'tweener readers have a real stake, willingly or not, and the real-world ethical dilemmas that the author lays out for Theo, the informer April, his lawyer parents, and even his friend Judge Gantry are all too real. Grisham's blithely corner-cutting young legal eagle seems to be taking a turn toward more mature ethical sensibilities as the move to ninth grade comes into sight. Still, this teen sleuth tale has the page-turning suspense that his readers require and is already a near best-seller. Will "Kid Lawyer" Theo survive a fourteenth birthday and graduation from middle school and go on to solve more cases? That's one mystery John Grisham doesn't reveal.

For middle readers who haven't yet met the irrepressible Theo Boone, the previous books in this series are Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, Theodore Boone: the Activist, Theodore Boone: the Abduction, and Theodore Boone: The Accused. (Read my reviews here)

Self-Defense: The Accused: Theodore Boone Series (Book 3) by John Grisham

Theo knew it was wrong, maybe not illegal, but certainly wrong.

The line between right and wrong had always been clear; now, though, nothing was clear. The wrongs were piling on top of him. It was wrong for someone to break into his locker and plant stolen loot with the obvious goal of getting him in trouble. It was wrong for someone to stalk him, to slash his tires and throw a rock through his window. Theo had done nothing wrong, yet was now being treated like a criminal. And if Theo were to be charged by the police, another wrong would occur. Was it wrong for Theo to steal a password, all in an effort to prevent another, much larger wrong?

Could doing something wrong lead to the right result?

Theo Boone knows that someone is out to get him. Accustomed to being on the sunny side of the law and order line, Theo Boone, kid lawyer, finds himself accused of a major felony, the forcible entry and burglary of an electronics store. When his school locker appears to have been vandalized and his favorite baseball cap stolen, Theo figures it is just part of a bully's on-going harassment. Running late, he puts off reporting the theft to the school office, and when four stolen netpads are found in his locker, the police seem certain they have the right felon.

Theo deduces that the planted goods are part of the chain of events--three slashed bike tires and a rock thrown through the window of his parents' law office, obviously meant to intimidate him--and he is certain that someone is out to exact revenge upon him and through him on his parents, but who and for what? With everything coming down on him, Theo knows that the only way he is going to escape being the defendant himself in a trial for robbery is to find the real thief first.

Theo turns to his sometime mentor, his disbarred, ne'er-do-well Uncle Ike, who shrewdly deduces that someone in his school is exacting retribution for a nasty divorce case handled by his mother. But to determine which of his classmates is holding that deep a grudge requires that Theo obtain the password to his mom's secured files. Can two wrongs make a right in this case?

As in most of his adult fiction, the protagonist in Book 3 of his Theodore Boone series, Theodore Boone: The Accused (Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer) (Dutton, 2012) doesn't always play it by the book, operating in the gray areas of right and wrong, going for what he sees as the greater good. It's easy to pick holes in the author's somewhat Swiss-cheesy plotline, and it is fair to point out that often Theo behaves and talks more like one of Grisham's thirty-something heroes than a middle school kid, but Grisham is first and foremost a storyteller, and once he's laid down his premise, the reader is off and running in one of his fast-moving page-turner legal thrillers. Likened to such staples of the juvenile mystery genre as Encylopedia Brownand Nancy Drew, Theodore Boone combines the qualities of Leroy and Nancy with a generous dose of Perry Mason and a dash of Grisham's iconic renegade hero Mitch McDeere.

Oh, and as for the resolution of the case against the golf course murderer Pete Duffy, indicted by the work of Theo Boone in the series opener, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, readers are going to have to wait for Book 4. Accused wife murderer Pete Duffy disappears without a trace on the night before his trial opens, so we'll have to wait for the next sequel, to give our busy kid lawyer a shot at bringing this perpetrator to justice.