The Guardians

The Guardians is a legal thriller by John Grisham, published in 2019. It is set in the world of wrongful convictions, where the work happens in prison visiting rooms and old files rather than in court.

Keith Russo is a young lawyer in the small Florida town of Seabrook, shot dead at his desk during a late night at the office. The case grows cold quickly, because there are no witnesses and no evident motive, but the investigation settles on Quincy Miller, a young Black man who had been a client of Russo's. Quincy is tried, convicted and sentenced to life, and for twenty-two years he maintains his innocence to people who are not listening. With no lawyer and no advocate, he writes to Guardian Ministries, a small non-profit run by Cullen Post, an attorney who is also an Episcopal minister and who accepts only a handful of cases at a time. Post takes up the file and finds rather more in it than the original investigation was willing to see.

Grisham writes about the slow, unglamorous work of demonstrating that a conviction was wrong, and the novel's tension comes from how much better resourced the people are who would prefer the verdict to stand.