Sycamore Row: Jake Brigance, hero of A TIME TO KILL, is back

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Jake Brigance has never met Seth Hubbard, or even heard of him, until the old man's suicide note names him attorney for his estate. The will is dynamite. Seth has left ninety per cent of his vast, secret fortune to his housemaid.

The vultures are circling even before the body is cold: the only subject more incendiary than money in Ford County is race, and this case has both.

As the relatives contest the will, and unscrupulous lawyers hasten to benefit, Jake searches for answers to the many questions left by Seth Hubbard's death:

What made him write that last-minute will leaving everything to a poor black woman named Lettie Lang

Why did he choose to kill himself on the desolate piece of land known as Sycamore Row

And what was it that Seth and his brother witnessed as children that, in his words, 'no human should ever see'

In the long-awaited successor to the novel that launched his phenomenal career, John Grisham brings us the powerful sequel to A Time to Kill. As filled with page-turning twists as it is with legal mastery, Sycamore Row proves beyond doubt that John Grisham is in a league of his own.

Reviews

a gripping read - Literary Review

A solid courtroom thriller with plenty to say about the long half-life of prejudice in the deep south... The much-trailed conclusion is powerful. - Guardian

As with earlier books by Grisham, what we are given here is the purest of unvarnished storytelling. Grisham has no truck with any studied elegance of style; he is more in touch with the strategies played out in the books of such predecessors as Erle Stanley Gardner and his dogged attorney, Perry Mason. But he knows that modern readers require a conflicted, multifaceted hero, and that he provides in Jake Brigance. It's good to see the troubled attorney back. - The Independent

Sycamore Row bristles with all the old authority....It's good to see the troubled attorney back - Independent

Grisham's decision to revive Brigance after almost 25 years and write what amounts to a historical novel is intriguing. He has produced a solid courtroom thriller with plenty to say about the long half-life of prejudice in the deep south. (Segregation, too: when Brigance invites Lang's 25-year-old daughter, Portia, home to dinner, he realises she is the first black person ever to have eaten in his house.) Coming so close on the heels of last year's The Racketeer, however, Sycamore Row can't help but disappoint. That novel, about a small-town lawyer jailed for accidentally laundering money, was a blast - as devious and unpredictable as its sociopathic antihero narrator. - Guardian

Author Bio

John Grisham is the author of twenty-five novels, one work of non-fiction, and one collection of short stories. His works are translated into thirty-eight languages. He lives in Virginia and Mississippi.