[1] In 1998, Travis Boyette abducts and rapes Nicole "Nikki" Yarber, a teenage girl and high school student in Slone, Texas.

He watches unfazed as the police arrest and convict Donte Drumm, a Black high school football player with no connection to the crime.

In 2007, with Drumm's execution only a week away, reflecting on his miserable life, he decides to do what is right: confess to carrying out the rape.

Boyette then reveals the resting place of Nikki, and DNA samples show signs of rape and assault on her body.

His creepy behavior remains apparent to others, notably the number of occasions in which he states to Reverend Schroeder how he thinks his wife Dana is "cute."

He makes a promise to Donté minutes before his execution that he would find the real killer and exonerate him for the sake of his family.

He is seen toward the end of the book trying to bring out Donté's past belief in God when all hope for a last-minute reprieve from the governor has been abandoned.

Eventually, his involvement in an illegal act, however justified, gets him in trouble with his bishop, but he is welcomed by a more socially active Lutheran congregation in Texas and becomes a committed opponent of the death penalty.

At the last minute, he agrees to sign an affidavit recanting his testimony and admitting he committed perjury, but it is too late.

The possibility of Donté being innocent never seems to occur to Paul, as he only cared about his legal reputation which has been badly damaged since his scandal with Judge Vivian Grale was publicly revealed.

Once he learns of Donté's innocence, he feigns ignorance of seeing Travis' confession and desperately attempts to settle matters in the Middle East as an excuse to leave the country.

[2] Writing in the Religious Left Law blog, David Nickol was adversely critical of the novel for not doing what it set out, presumably, to achieve, (i.e. to present a firm case against the death-penalty through the medium of fiction).

Its failings, he said, derive from the fact that the events of the Donte's case "are so egregious that...[o]ne does not need to be a death-penalty opponent to find repugnant the blatant railroading of someone so clearly innocent".

[3] Maureen Corrigan in the Washington Post reviewed the novel in terms of the way in which Grisham gets across a message to the reader about his own views on the death penalty deriving from his work on the Innocence Project.

This and the race issue that divides the community in Texas between Blacks and Whites is described by Corrigan as Grisham's "superb work of social criticism".

"[4] Natahniel Roward in "The Long Road to Death Penalty Abolition" noted that "Grisham drives home dramatically one of the major arguments used by the opponents of capital punishment: that an execution is completely irreversible.

Grisham's best literary feat is to create a scenario where this is plausible - due to the quirky and unpredictable personality of the real killer, whose vacillation on coming out with his confession lasts just twenty-four hours too long.

Also, a late petition to the TCCA that was denied because the doors had been locked and that the chief justice (Milton Prudlowe in the novel) had refused an extension happened in the case of Michael Wayne Richard.

Donte himself refers directly to the Willingham case in talking about how inmates die: “Some don’t say a word, just close their eyes and wait for the poison.

He cussed ’em in his final statement.” Grisham had researched and written a book about a real-life case of an innocent person wrongfully sentenced to death (The Innocent Man) and many details of Donte's police investigation and trial, as well as the psychological effects of his years on Death Row, are clearly inspired by that case.