The Judge's List

The Judge’s List (2021) by American author John Grisham is the second book in a series of legal thrillers. The first book, The Whistler, introduces Laci Stolz, an investigator for the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct (BJC), which investigates allegations of judicial misconduct. In The Judge’s List, Lacy is becoming bored with her career and is thinking about a change when she receives a tip about a judge who may be a serial killer.

Grisham, a lawyer, has written 50 novels as of 2022, most of which are legal thrillers. His work routinely explores elements of the legal system, especially its failures and moral ambiguities. The premise of this series is the potential for criminal activity in the judiciary. As the author points out in both books, Grisham believes the judiciary branch of government is remarkably free of corruption, and he emphasizes that neither of the antagonists in either book is based on or reflective of reality.

This guide references the 2021 Penguin Random House ebook edition.

Plot Summary

Lacy Stoltz’s life is on a fast track to nowhere. Her relationship with her boyfriend Allie Pacheco is stalled, and her job with the BJR feels like a dead end. One day, she is contacted by Jeri Crosby, a woman who has spent the last 20 years pursuing a judge she believes to be a serial killer.

Jeri’s involvement began with the murder of her father, a professor of constitutional law. He was struck in the head and then strangled with a nylon rope tied off in a distinctive knot. Jeri narrowed the suspects down to a student, Ross Bannick, whose arrogance years earlier had resulted in his embarrassment in front of Jeri’s father’s class. Over the years, Jeri has found several other murders committed the same way, with heads crushed and necks strangled with a nylon cord and tied with the same knot. Each of the victims had crossed Bannick’s path and apparently angered him in some way.

The first victim was a scout leader who very likely abused Bannick when he was still a boy. Another was a girl who humiliated him as a frat party in college. There was also a reporter who broke a story that cost Bannick an election to his first judgeship. The most recent victim—to Jeri’s knowledge—was two years ago: a lawyer who failed to offer Bannick a full-time job after a summer internship.

Jeri does not know that the most recent murder took place only five months earlier. Bannick had killed Lanny Verno, a house painter who pulled a gun on Bannick in a dispute 13 years ago, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. Bannick had killed Verno’s supervisor, who showed up at an inopportune moment.

Lacy has mixed feelings about investigating the case, and she is almost relieved when her supervisor tells her the BJC will not take it; they would just have to turn it over to the police or the FBI. Lacy reports back to Jeri that her supervisor said she would refuse to investigate. Jeri asks Lacy whether, if it were up to her, she would investigate. Lacy cannot answer.

Lacy receives a summons to meet with the administrative board of the BJC. They tell her that her supervisor has quit. They want Lacy to take over as interim director while they look for someone permanent. The deciding factor for Lacy to accept is that she would be able to investigate the judge.

Jeri receives information on the Lanny Verno murder, which matches the judge’s MO (modus operandi). She hires a private investigator, Rollie Tabor, who finds a court report on an old case involving Verno in which the complainant’s name has been redacted and the trial record is missing. He tracks down the arresting officer in the case and learns that the complainant was a lawyer named Ross Bannick.

Now that Lacy is in charge of the BJC, she is free to file Jeri’s complaint and investigate without going directly to the police. Jeri sends the judge a message anonymously telling him that he is under investigation and indicating that she knows about his past crimes. Realizing that whoever sent the letter must have seen the court filing on the Lanny Verno court case, Bannick goes to the evidence warehouse and examines the file on Verno. He looked at these same files five months ago around the time he killed Verno and blacked out his own name. This time, however, he makes a note of the officer who arrested Verno: Norris Ozment.

Bannick tracks down Ozment. The officer remembers the case because a private detective had been there a few days earlier asking about it. He gives Bannick the license number of the car the detective was driving. Bannick uses his personal computer’s spyware to track the license plate to Hertz Rent-A-Car and find the name of the driver: Rollie Tabor. As Bannick closes in on Jeri, Jeri sends him two more taunting letters.

Bannick goes on a cleaning spree, wiping his fingerprints from every surface in his home and office. He is sure now that Jeri is the one who has been tracking him for 20 years. He plants a tracking device on her car, then puts the letters she sent him in an envelope and hand-delivers them to her door. Jeri panics, packs a bag, and goes on the run, unaware that Bannick is tracking her car. When she stops and holes up in a motel, Bannick uses his spyware to slip into the motel computer and find out what room she is in. Knocking her unconscious with ether, he takes her to a cabin off the main road and interrogates her to find out how much Lacy and the FBI know about him. He forces Jeri to call Lacy and ask her to meet at the motel.

Lacy is having lunch with her brother Gunther when she gets the call from Jeri. She asks Gunther to go with her to the meeting, which he is delighted to do; he loves the excitement and intrigue. At the motel, Lacy makes her way to Jeri’s room. She is standing in the doorway of the empty room when Bannick charges behind her with an either-soaked cloth. He barely gets his hands on her when Gunther piles into him. After a scuffle, Bannick gets away and heads back toward the cabin. He arrives to find it surrounded by police cars. While he was gone, two teenagers broke in and found Jeri unconscious.

Slipping away unseen, Bannick heads west. While the FBI searches his home and office, Bannick drives all the way to Texas and checks into a discrete drug rehabilitation facility. There, he burns off his fingerprints with acid, overdoses on Oxycontin, and is found dead the next morning.

Unable to get fingerprints from the body, the FBI has no chance of linking Bannick to the murders until Jeri tracks down the truck Bannick was seen driving away from one of the murder scenes. Searching the truck, they find enough prints to match a partial thumbprint found at the Verno murder scene. The authorities can finally link Bannick to one of his ten killings.