John Grisham

John Grisham, born in 1955, earned his law degree at the University of Mississippi in 1981, practiced criminal law for about a decade and served in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990. His first novel, A Time to Kill, came out in June 1989, four years after he started writing it. His second, The Firm (1991), sold more than seven million copies, was filmed in 1993 with Tom Cruise, and let him give up practicing law; its success also brought A Time to Kill a new audience.

The Pelican Brief and The Client were the second-bestselling books of 1992 and 1993, and from 1994 to 2000 he had the year's number-one bestseller every year. Many of his novels are set in the fictional town of Clanton in Ford County, Mississippi, among them A Time to Kill, The Chamber, The Last Juror and Sycamore Row; others use real Southern settings such as Biloxi and New Orleans. He has also written the Theodore Boone books for younger readers, the non-legal Camino Island novels, and the nonfiction The Innocent Man (2006), about the case of Ron Williamson. Grisham serves on the board of the Innocence Project, which uses DNA evidence to challenge wrongful convictions.

Start with The Firm rather than A Time to Kill. It is the book that made his name and the clearest version of his formula: Mitch McDeere, a top Harvard Law graduate, accepts an unusually generous offer from a small Memphis tax firm and discovers why. Read A Time to Kill second, and know what you are getting into: it opens with the violent rape of a ten-year-old Black girl in Clanton, and her father, Carl Lee Hailey, asks his friend, the lawyer Jake Brigance, whether he could be acquitted if he killed the two men responsible.

If Clanton grabs you, follow Jake Brigance into Sycamore Row (2013) and A Time for Mercy (2020). For another early stand-alone, The Pelican Brief (1992) is a good third pick.