Thirty-one years have passed in the real world since we were first in Clanton, but only five in its fictional life. (Among other things, this client left most of his considerable fortune not to his children but to his Black housekeeper, and not for the reasons you might think.) And now comes “A Time for Mercy.” You get the feeling that Grisham, who has written several dozen books by now, has returned to the place closest to his heart. Jake reappeared in “Sycamore Row” (2013), this time in the service of a recently deceased client with an idiosyncratic view of estate planning. Some readers like it best of all Grisham’s books. ![]() The novel is a nuanced, sensitive portrait of a particular time and place in a rural south still riven by racial discord and infected by the Ku Klux Klan, a fine work wrapped inside a legal thriller. Set in 1985 in the fictional town of Clanton, Miss., “A Time to Kill” described Jake’s defense of an undeniably guilty but very sympathetic client - a Black man on trial for killing the two white men who brutally raped his 10-year-old daughter. He first appeared more than 30 years ago in Grisham’s debut novel, “A Time to Kill” (1989), which began with a printing of 5,000 copies but became a runaway best seller (and a movie, starring Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock) after the explosive popularity of Grisham’s second novel, “The Firm” (1991), which didn’t feature Brigance. “A Time for Mercy” is the third John Grisham novel to feature Brigance, a small-town Mississippi lawyer specializing in unpopular, seemingly unwinnable cases. It’s reassuring to remember that not everyone is crazy and unpredictable, and that books, even books about crime and punishment, can help restore our equilibrium in this season of high anxiety. It’s nice to return to the courtroom with someone we trust. He still serves as its Commissioner.Hello again, Jake Brigance! You’ve come back at the right time. Much of his recent fiction explores deep-seated problems in our criminal justice systems.Ī graduate of Mississippi State University and Ole Miss Law School, he lives on a farm in central Virginia, around the corner from the youth baseball complex he built in 1996. When he's not writing, he serves on the Board of Directors of the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. He is the two-time winner of the Harper Lee Prize For Legal Fiction and was distinguished with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award For Fiction. His lone work of non-fiction, The Innocent Man, was adapted into a six-part Netflix docuseries. An avid sports fan, he has written two novels about football, one about baseball, and in 2021 he published Sooley, a story set in the world of college basketball. His Theodore Boone series for young readers is now in development at Netflix. Ten have been adapted to film, including The Firm, The Pelican Brief, and A Time To Kill. ![]() His books have been translated into 45 languages and have sold over 350 million copies worldwide. ![]() Beginning with The Firm in 1991, John Grisham has published at least one #1 bestseller every year.
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