52 pages • 1 hour read
John GrishamThe Judge's List
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Lacy is working in her office at the BJC. Things have gone downhill in the three years since she closed the Whistler case in which a judge was working with a crooked land developer to embezzle millions of dollars from a casino on nearby Indigenous land. Her colleagues from that period have all moved on to bigger and better jobs. Lacy is the only one left from the old guard in a department falling apart from bad management, lack of funding, and low morale. The receptionist announces that Lacy has a phone call from someone who does not want to give her name. The receptionist is barely competent. She needs someone to correct her and teach her how to do her job better, but Lacy does not have the energy.
The caller introduces herself as Margie—which she admits up front is an alias. She asks Lacy to meet her somewhere private outside of the BJC office. Lacy meets her at a coffee shop, and Margie tells her a story about a judge who killed her father and several other people.
After 12 years at the BJC doing what feels like petty, unchallenging work, Lacy is intrigued by a murder. The problem is that the BJC does not investigate murders. That is a matter for the police, but Margie does not trust the police. She is afraid to say anymore at the coffee shop. She asks Lacy to meet her again the next day, and Margie will tell her more. She leaves Lacy with a file that will fill her in on some of the background of the case.
Chapter 2 Summary
In a second meeting with Lacy, Margie reveals that her real name is Jeri Crosby. She tells Lacy about her father, a beloved teacher of constitutional law at Stetson University in South Carolina. On three occasions, he had interactions in the classroom with a student which showed the student to be intelligent but arrogant and overconfident. In the final interaction, when he lost the debate to the professor, the student threw a screaming tantrum and charged from the classroom never to return. He stalked Jeri’s father for a while, but nothing came of it. Eventually, the student wound up in a mental health facility with a nervous breakdown, which he blamed on Jeri’s father.
After his release, the student finished law school and became a judge. Sometime later, Jeri’s father was murdered by asphyxiation with a nylon rope. Jeri has found five other murders with the same MO. Each of the victims had a connection to the judge, who appears to have stalked them for years.
Chapter 3 Summary
Lacy returns home to her apartment to think about the case. She is confident that Jeri Crosby is not lying about what she believes, but that does not mean her story is true. Lacy searches online for the identity of the judge based on the information Jeri gave her. She identifies him as Ross Bannick.
Bannick campaigned for election to the bench in Pensacola, Florida in 2000. He was found to be associated with a dishonest land developer. Although Bannick himself was not directly involved in anything illegal, he lost badly to the incumbent. In 2004, he won his campaign against the same incumbent judge, and three months later, his opponent, who was in his 90s and in poor health, died.
Speaking to Jeri on the phone, Lacy learns that Jeri has been unable to get close enough to meet Bannick because his courtroom and home are covered by security cameras. According to Jeri, the reporter who broke the story about the land developer was found dead nine years later, murdered by means identical to how Jeri’s father was killed.
Jeri tells Lacy that she gets information about past cases from the police without leaving a trail by posing as a journalist, private investigator, or novelist. She finds short skirts and charm to be effective tools for manipulating men.
Chapter 4 Summary
Lacy takes a personal day to meet with Jeri again face-to-face. Lacy’s emotions are mixed. She is excited about Jeri’s case, but she is not sure she believes there is really anything there. Her general feelings about her job and her life are negative. She is about to turn 40, and her relationship with her boyfriend Allie Pacheco is going nowhere. Her career is at a dead end. Three years ago, she and the BJC took down a circuit judge who had been dealing with a crooked real estate developer. Eventually, there will be a settlement for the injuries Lacy sustained while on the case, but the money is being held up in court. She is looking forward to being able to walk away from her job. Meanwhile, she has cases to close.
On the way to a meeting with Jeri in Pensacola, Lacy gets a call from her brother Gunther. Gunther is a real estate mogul always working a new deal, and he loves his little sister. Lacy finds him exhausting and exasperating.
Chapter 5 Summary
Lacy meets Jeri in the Brookleaf Cemetery in Pensacola. Jeri takes Lacy to the grave of Thad Leawood. Leawood was a scoutmaster who was forced to retire after allegations of abuse. One of the boys in his troop was Ross Bannick, although there was never any allegation that Bannick was one of his victims. A year after Leawood’s departure, he was found murdered—asphyxiated with a rope exactly like the reporter and Jeri’s father.
Jeri takes Lacy to the nearby town of Cullman where Bannick lived as a child. His father had died at the age of 61, and his mother had a mental illness and died in an institution. Bannick lives in a gated community not far from the neighborhood where he grew up.
Chapter 6 Summary
They stop for lunch, and Lacy interrogates Jeri, trying to get more information. According to Jeri, Leawood was the first victim, and Jeri’s father was the second. The third victim was a girl Bannick knew in law school, but Jeri is not prepared to talk about her yet. The reporter, Danny Cleveland, came somewhere in the middle. The most recent was two years ago: a lawyer named Perry Kronke who Bannick believed had cheated him out of a job at his firm.
Jeri and Lacy spend some time driving around, talking about serial killers and Bannick in particular. Jeri has spent years studying and reading about serial killers. According to Jeri, serial killers do not want to get caught, but they sometimes like to leave clues or send letters to the investigators because they want someone to know they are out there.
Jeri finally asks what their next step will be. Lacy explains that her department cannot investigate until a formal complaint has been filed, and then they have 45 days to investigate before informing the judge in question. Lacy is unsure whether the complaining party can remain anonymous; she will have to ask her supervisor. Jeri has memorized the relevant statutes and knows that if a complaint is filed, the BJC must investigate, but Lacy thinks they would ultimately wind up turning it over to the police.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
Chapter 1 introduces the idea that Lacy has been left behind in a dead-end job where she feels bored and frustrated. She sees everything that is wrong with the management of the department and knows what needs to be done to correct it, but she has no authority to do anything about it. Her job feels unimportant and unappreciated. These circumstances reflect the theme of How Women Navigate Systems of Power.
Throughout the first half of the story, Jeri will dole out information to Lacy in bits and pieces. This is due to Jeri’s lack of trust; she has been working alone for so long, afraid that the judge may find out about her, that she is always a little paranoid. She wants to feel Lacy out before she gives the other woman her trust. In terms of story development, the gradual revelations are meant to incrementally build suspense as the menace of the antagonist grows.
The incident with Jeri’s father reveals the antagonist to be both arrogant and fragile. He had the arrogance to argue with a seasoned law professor with decades of experience, but when he lost the debate, he was overcome with rage. The experience affected him so powerfully that he experienced a breakdown of his mental health, showing that he struggles to manage his emotions. The reference in Chapter 5 to Bannick’s mother having a mental illness reinforces the conclusion that the judge may have a psychological condition himself. The calculation with which he planned his murders and spaced them out over the course of decades suggests that he learned enough self-control to delay gratification but retained his vengeful nature.
Meanwhile, Jeri observes that men are more inclined to cooperate with women who make them feel desirable. This might say something about the author’s bias. Men are measurably more likely to interpret a woman’s casual behavior as flirtatious if they are attracted to the woman, and that may cause men to feel women are deliberately using men’s libidos to manipulate them. On the other hand, some women do admit to wearing their hair differently or sitting closer than usual to a male superior, hoping to gain advantages in their jobs.
In the first book, The Whistler, the author explored the dynamics of female friendships, showing Lacy’s personal loyalty to other women when men were content to relegate the responsibility for women’s safety to local law enforcement. Lacy’s interactions with Jeri show the promise of that loyalty forming between them.
In Chapter 4, the conversation with Lacy’s brother introduces Gunther and their relationship, foreshadowing Gunther’s later involvement in the story. In The Whistler, Gunther was instrumental to Lacy’s efforts to solve the case. Lacy appears to not want to talk to Gunther, finding him both exhausting and exasperating, but in the previous book they were close. Gunther had her back then when no one else did.
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By John Grisham
