The Confession

The Confession is a legal thriller by the American writer John Grisham, published in 2010 and one of two novels he released that year.

The book begins with a crime committed in 1998 outside a small town in East Texas, where a popular high school girl is abducted and killed by Travis Boyette, who buries her body in another state and then watches the investigation settle on somebody else. Donté Drumm, a football player with no connection to the killing, is convicted and sentenced to death, and nine years later he is days away from execution while a lawyer named Robbie Flak works through every legal avenue left to him. By then Boyette is a parolee in Kansas, ill and frightened of what comes next, and his decision to tell the truth sets off a race in which the only person who can save Drumm is the man who killed the girl.

Grisham wrote the novel around the machinery of a death penalty case and the cost of the years in which nobody with the power to stop it was listening.