Customer Reviews

The Twelfth Juror

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I can't believe that I'm the first to review a book that is this good and that was published so long ago (in 1984). I found that Ms. Gill's writing style reminded somewhat of Ruth Rendell or even P.D. James. Yes, she is that good! This is a book about a jury on a high-profile murder trial, and it gives a wonderful description of how the different personalities of "12 men and women and true" play out when they are placed together to decide the fate of a man, and to decide whether or not he killed his wife. That would be enough to make the book memorable, but the surprise ending will totally astonish you. Ms. Gill's psychological profiling of the twelve jurors, the accused and the murderer is quite astounding. Great Book!

B. M. Gill is the pseudonym of British crime writer Barbara Margaret Trimble (b. 1921), who also writes under the name of Margaret Blake.

I stumbled upon "The Twelfth Juror," because I have a particular interest in novels in which jurors are major characters (excluding all of Grisham's novels). If I weren't writing a series of mysteries myself about a juror-turned-amateur-sleuth, I probably would never have discovered this marvelous writer. Now I'm scouring the web for used copies of her other books, because everything she wrote appears to be out of print (last pub. date 1991)--and only published in the U.K. to boot.

"The Twelfth Juror" is a page-turner and very smart, too--which is rare. Much like the BBC's miniseries, "The Jury," "The Twelfth Juror" follows a murder trial day by day and into deliberations; at night, though, it follows one of the jurors home. The twelve jurors are all interesting characters with personal reasons for agreeing to serve on the jury. The murder is a real whodunit. And the ending, while logical and inevitable, is startling.

Find a used copy of this book here at Amazon. I paid only $0.39 plus $3.99 shipping/handling--and would have paid more given my reasons for buying it. Having read it, I will gladly pay more the rest of Ms. Trimble's "corpus."