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Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Grisham, J. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
In suburban Georgetown a killer's Reeboks whisper on the front floor of a posh home... In a seedy D.C. porno house a patron is swiftly garroted to death... The next day America learns that two of its Supreme Court justices have been assassinated. And in New Orleans, a young law student prepares a legal brief... To Darby Shaw it was no more than a legal shot in the dark, a brilliant guess. To the Washington establishment it was political dynamite. Suddenly Darby is witness to a murder -- a murder intended for her. Going underground, she finds there is only one person she can trust -- an ambitious reporter after a newsbreak hotter than Watergate -- to help her piece together the deadly puzzle. Somewhere between the bayous of Louisiana and the White House's inner sanctums, a violent cover-up is being engineered. For somone has read Darby's brief. Someone who will stop at nothing to destroy the evidence of an unthinkable crime. From the Paperback edition.
Author Notes
John Grisham was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas on February 8, 1955. He received a bachelor's degree in accounting from Mississippi State University. He was admitted to the bar in Mississippi in 1981 after receiving a law degree from the University of Mississippi, specializing in criminal law. While a lawyer in private practice in Southaven, Mississippi, Grisham served as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 until 1990. He left the law and politics to become a full-time author.
His first novel, A Time to Kill, was published in 1989. His other novels include The Partner, The Street Lawyer, The Testament, The Brethren, The Summons, The King of Torts, Bleachers, The Last Juror, The Broker, Playing for Pizza, The Appeal, Calico Joe, The Racketeer, Gray Mountain, Rogue Lawyer, The Confession, The Litigators, The Whistler, Camino Island, The Rooster Bar, and the Theodore Boone series. Several of his novels were adapted into films including The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Chamber, A Painted House, The Runaway Jury, and Skipping Christmas.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this tale of the aftermath of the assassinations of two Supreme Court justices, Grisham delivers a suspenseful plot at a breakneck pace, although his characters are stereotypes. The hardcover was on the PW bestseller list 48 weeks and the mass market was No. 1 last week. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Gripping legal suspenser by the author of last year's hallucinatory The Firm--and an even stronger performance than that still-current bestseller. Grisham also strikes gold with public awareness of the furor over the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Thomas. Where The Firm clamped into the reader's greed for the perks of a supersuccessful young lawyer in an almost fantasy law firm, Grisham's second is a tale that baits its own hooks with the lures of All the President's Men. That much of what happens here happens regularly in suspense novels (sudden stranglings and murders) in no way lessens the novel's intensity and feeling of freshness--a freshness that springs in both novels from Grisham's focus on top law students, cloistered brains who find themselves raw beginners in the real world but afloat on cash. Here, second-year law student at Tulane Darby Shaw sets out to solve the seemingly motiveless simultaneous murders of two largely liberal Supreme Court judges who were killed two hours apart on the same night. A lone assassin or a conspiracy? Clearly someone wants the conservative Republican president, a grandfatherly nerd mainly interested in his golf game, to pack the already conservative Court. Darby reviews hundreds of the Court's upcoming cases and sees only one that fulfills the breadth of evil needed to account for such desperate measures as double murder: a multibillion-dollar oil venture in Louisiana that will kill off the state's beloved but endangered brown pelican. Darby's brief on this ``fictional'' case finds its way to the White House, the FBI, and the CIA. Then Darby's lover, her constitutional-law professor, to whom she has shown the brief, is blown up in a car-bomb explosion meant also to have killed Darby. The story's vitality springs from Grisham's relentless enlivening of Darby's fears as she flees about the country in a closing web of killers while trying to help Washington Post reporter Gray Grantham get the goods on the baddies in a newsbreak bigger than Watergate. Must entertainment for legal folk. Should outsell The Firm. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for May)
Booklist Review
Lawyers are supposed to be able to write well. An attorney who thought better of it, Grisham demonstrated in The Firm that he writes well enough to reach the best-seller list. His new thriller stars a lawyer--well, okay, just a wannabe lawyer, a student--who discovers some other lawyers' sleazy doings and then has to run for dear life from their wrath. Smart, gorgeous Darby Shaw stumbles across the motive and the man behind the assassinations of two Supreme Court justices. Almost immediately afterward, she's nearly killed in a car bombing, and those to whom she imparts her knowledge start dropping like the proverbial winged sextapeds. She finally gets reliable help from a Washington Post reporter who rightly intuits that at least some blame for the murderous shenanigans can be found in the Oval Office. Heads will roll when the truth comes out. Until then, Darby and her scribbler have to keep their own noggins on their necks. An exciting read even if the President, the two ill-fated justices, the White House chief of staff, the wealthy mastermind of the assassins, and other powerful supporting players are cartoonishly ruthless, amoral, and lowbrow. Are those in high places really this repugnant? (Reviewed Jan. 15, 1992)0385421982Ray Olson