Is there such a thing as the “perfect victim”? Is it an old lady who is suddenly mugged on the street? And where does a greedy lawyer, eager to profit from an elderly widow’s demise, fit in? Would we have sympathy if he was manipulated and wrongly accused of her murder?

Such questions of victimhood lie at the heart of John Grisham’s new novel, The Widow. The book is marketed as a classic Grisham courtroom drama with the addition of a whodunnit-style mystery – the writer’s first foray into this genre.

Our protagonist is Simon F. Latch, a working-class lawyer who covers routine legal matters such as bankruptcy and wills. Simon struggles with illegal gambling and a fondness for alcohol, which worsens his already struggling marriage and barely profitable legal practice.

Potential for change arrives when Eleanor Barnett, an 85-year-old widow with no family, comes to his office in rural Virginia to secure a new will and claims she is sitting on a US$20 million (£149 million) fortune. Eleanor entrusts oversight of her estate to Simon, whose new drafting of her will ensures he will earn legal fees of US$500 per hour when the will is eventually brought to probate.

Simon sneaks deeper into Eleanor’s life by secretly taking her out to lunch, then begins to take control of her personal affairs – all the while keeping her wealth a secret. But when Eleanor dies under suspicious circumstances after being in a car accident, Simon suddenly finds himself in the dock for murder.

As ever, Grisham’s theme of law as a corrupt system is omnipresent. Simon is arrested and tried for a crime he didn’t commit. The police stop investigating now they have their man and have retrofitted him with the crime.

The criminologist Nils Christie defined the ideal victim as the one generating the most sympathy from society. Victimhood, he argued, is socially constructed – not simply a matter of who suffers harm.

So, as an old lady who is seen by society as vulnerable, Eleanor is the ideal victim, whereas as a lawyer – a career marked by negative sterotypes like opportunism, avarice, manipulation and lack of trustworthiness – Simon is hardly the model of a good victim.

But the facts are rarely so simple. Not only is Eleanor not entirely blameless in her conduct, Simon is not entirely malevolent. While he clearly has ulterior motives, he appears to genuinely befriend Eleanor. He also has frequent doubts about his will drafting which, though morally questionable, is technically legal. Grisham does a good job at developing the grey within the black-and-white letter of the law.

As someone with a background in law, I was pleasantly surprised to see Grisham highlighting how the procedural delays and bureaucracy of the legal system can psychologically affect even those who are most familiar with it, such as judges, defence lawyers and The Widow’s lawyer-defendant.

While a serious criminal conviction can obviously deprive a person of their liberty, even before the trial stage Simon is shown to have lost his friends, privacy and livelihood. The ripple effect of notoriety is felt by his children too, who are forced to move with their mother to a faraway town to escape press intrusion.

American law professor and literary critic James Boyd White believed that law is a form of storytelling, and that fiction helps us understand the ethical dimensions of legal problems.

Going a step further, theorists in the Critical Legal Studies movement assert that the law tells stories about itself to sustain its legitimacy. French theorist Michel Foucault believed that legal procedures often create injustice rather than prevent it, because power produces the discourse that justifies it. In his view, the law was not neutral but constructed through power relations.

While Grisham’s previous books have frequently criticised the legal system, his characters have been able to use loopholes or alternative reasoning to affirm the belief that justice is ultimately always possible.

The Widow marks a key departure in Grisham’s thinking by suggesting that alternative, illegal or non-legal action is sometimes needed. Simon realises that legal knowledge has its limits and instead assumes the role of detective to clear his name.

While a critical reader may consider this a convenient plot device that makes the most of the current boom in mystery novels, it emerges as an astute acknowledgment that, sometimes, order must be broken to avoid disorder. As detective, Simon turns to illegal computer hackers and convinces an old friend to clandestinely use FBI resources to uncover the identity of the true killer. The implication is that sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

Given that the “whodunnit” element forms less than a quarter of the overall book, its effect is ultimately limited. The change of approach is rather abrupt, and mystery fans may feel shortchanged in terms of the number of clues Grisham provides. Also, the novel’s conclusion seems rushed and curiously detached given the emotional journey readers have been on with Simon.

While The Widow may not satisfy readers looking for a tightly woven mystery, it rewards those who are interested in the murky overlap between law and morality. By giving us a suspect who isn’t entirely guilty, the novel deconstructs our assumed binaries of good versus evil, victim versus perpetrator, and innocence versus guilt. In doing so, it reminds us that, sometimes, the only way to survive the system is to subvert it.

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This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Sarah-Jane Coyle, Queen's University Belfast

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Sarah-Jane Coyle receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.