Simon Latch is a seasoned attorney in a dead marriage who struggles to make ends meet, even as he sleeps on a cot in his office. When an elderly woman approaches him for some estate work and mentions that she has $16 million in stocks between Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola, his heart can’t help but skip a beat.  “Miss Netty” could keep him from complete insolvency. As Simon goes to work preparing a will that will keep her and her late husband’s money from being devoured by the locusts at the IRS, he also begins making himself into Miss Netty’s friend, treating her to dinners every week, and gently prodding her to take her end-of-life care more seriously. Then, she dies – and Simon finds himself being accused of murder.  While I do have a large gripe with this novel, The Widow was largely better than most of the potboilers Grisham has churned out in the last twenty years – not a great challenge, to be sure.   I enjoyed it until close to the end, when the supposed whodunit  gets an ending from out of left field: it’s not a mystery that allows the reader to participate in the conclusion of, let’s say.  I liked the relative intimacy of the novel, as we’re dealing with only a few characters, and Simon is a delicate mix of pathetic and morally…muddy. He’s not a bad guy by any means,  and I’d argue that his client is taking as much advantage of him as he hopes to take of her – she’s milking him for food and all manner of services, legal and otherwise,  while he waits for the penny-pinching woman to start paying him for his time. His being accused of murder and placed on the wrong side of the bar was a fun change, but I found the resolution rushed and unsatisfying. Still,  it kept me safe from the blue glow of a computer screen for a few hours!