4 books like Charlotte Justice

I was blown away by the authentic voices of the characters, the quick pacing, and the theme of justice confronting racial hatred in a courthouse and a community. Something tells me that Grisham himself might be most proud of this first novel, even over his many fine ones that followed it. Recently, I went back to read some of this book.

I wanted to remember how Grisham wrote about place and atmosphere. I found myself sweating as I took in his words describing the hot southern town. I re-read the entire novel.

This one’s the fastest read of the bunch; in fact, you may find yourself rebooting for a second savory read without putting it down. Sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon faces a life sentence for his alleged participation in a robbery that killed a convenience store owner. To cope with the horrors of his cell block, where the spirited African American teen is housed until his trial ends, Steve recounts events before and after the crime in the form of a screenplay; this enthralling courtroom drama deep-dives into the racial and economic forces responsible for overcrowding our flawed criminal justice system. Steve’s perseverance against odds is truly inspiring.  

This noir pastiche is one long joke, a satire on art, art criticism, and art collecting.

James Figueras, a cad bachelor freelance art critic in 1960s Palm Beach, is tasked with stealing a painting by the (fictional) French artist Jacques Deberiue.

Deberiue was the founder of the Nihilistic Surrealism movement who retired after the creation of one work, No. One: an empty frame mounted around a crack in a wall. The trail leads to the dusty outskirts of Miami and a bloody murder in the Everglades, but the real mystery surrounds the artist and his art.

And the fun is in the comedy: "The fact that he used the English No. One instead of Nombre une may or may not've influenced Samuel Beckett to write in French instead of English, as the literary critic Leon Mindlin has claimed."

In the dark world of hardboiled literature, anything can happen at any time for any reason—or no reason at all. In my view, that makes things easy for this debut novel about an unemployed LA factory worker named Easy Rawlins, and that makes things challenging for the story—for the character—as well. 

A man with money and power offers Easy a job looking for a missing blond-haired, white-skinned beauty. Rawlins faces only two problems: He has no experience as a private detective, and he needs to do the detecting with black skin in a segregated, remarkably unequal 1948 America. 

But I think Mosley has found the perfect genre for his character, one whose tough and humane and even psychologically insightful qualities have enabled him to adjust to, learn from, and survive in a place where laws can break out or disappear, depending on the color of his skin. Rawlins finds it… show more.