John Grisham

Rogue Lawyer is John Grisham's thirtieth novel. From the author's interview with Bill Tipper for The Barnes & Noble Review:

The Barnes & Noble Review: What I was immediately struck in by Rogue Lawyer, by comparison to earlier books, was a shift in your writing style and kind of the diction and velocity of the prose. It took me a minute to orient myself. I thought, “This is as hard-boiled as I think I’ve read John Grisham.” Was that your intention?

John Grisham: Oh, sure. I started writing it probably three years ago, just as an idea. I have a lot of ideas for stories based on real cases I read about, usually something dealing with a horrible injustice in the system, something that I would love to see addressed or fixed or exposed or written about. There are a lot of those.

BNR: Some kind of flaw in the way that we think about justice and the law that produces a story.

JG: Sure. A lot of those, though, cannot stand up to the rigors of a full-length novel. So they are smaller stories. I want to address the issues: I want to meet some of the characters. For years I’ve been thinking how can I do that in such a way that I can make it compelling and readable and a whole lot of fun. So I came up with this voice, which is basically me, my observations of the system. When I was a lawyer, I sort of admired the guys who were really out-there, the fearless guys who were taking the bad cases, who would take the case nobody else would take, who were in court all the time, who were basically just kind of fearless. I wasn’t that way. I was a bit too nervous.

This all came out in the character of Sebastian: A voice, the guy who’s at war with the system, the guy who’s fighting for injustice, and then through him we can...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue