Grisham, John: Framed

The truth is more shocking than fiction when it comes from John Grisham. In Framed John Grisham, the master of the legal thriller, teams up with Jim McCloskey, the founder of Centurion Ministries, the first US organisation dedicated to exonerating innocent people, to share ten gripping and shocking true stories that shine an astonishing light on miscarriages of justice. These stories, all taken from Centurion's files, shook America's belief in the criminal justice system - and for good reason. In the aftermath of terrible crimes, the public demand immediate justice. Overaggressive and ofte n racist police and prosecutors rush for a quick conviction. The result: innocent people are put behind bars for years, sometimes on Death Row. These include Joe Bryan, who suffered the unbearable tragedy of his wife's murder only to be tried and found guilty of the crime - though he had been 120 miles away at the time it was committed. He remained in prison for 34 years. And Clarence Brandley, the only black caretaker at a high school, convicted of rape and murder solely on the basis of his race, who spent nine years on Death Row. He came within six days of execution before new evidence cleared him of all charges. And the case of The Norfolk Four: where police and prosecutors were so wedded to the impossible case they had concocted that they kept arresting innocent people to make sense of it until not one, but four men were behind bars. All the cases in this book are simply extraordinary. Innocent people were forced to sacrifice friends, families and decades of their lives. In many instances, the real guilty parties went free - some, shockingly, to repeat their crimes. Impeccably researched and told with page-turning suspense as only John Grisham can deliver, Framed is the story of how truth can prevail and how freedom can be won when all seems lost and the deck is stacked against you.