Bleachers

High school all-American Neely Crenshaw was probably the best quarterback ever to

play for the legendary Messina Spartans. Fifteen years have gone by since those glory

days, and Neely has come home to Messina to bury Coach Eddie Rake, the man who

molded the Spartans into an unbeatable football dynasty.

Now, as Coach Rake's "boys" sit in the bleachers waiting for the dimming field lights to

signal his passing, they replay the old games, relive the old glories, and try to decide once

and for all whether they love Eddie Rake—or hate him. For Neely Crenshaw, a man who

must finally forgive his coach—and himself—before he can get on with his life, the

stakes are especially high.

JOHN GRISHAM played (at times) quarterback for the Chargers of Southaven High

School, Southaven, Mississippi. He was not an all-American.

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The Client

Mark was eleven and had been smoking off and on for two years, never trying to quit but

being careful not to get hooked. He preferred Kools, his ex-father's brand, but his mother

smoked Virginia Slims at the rate of two packs a day, and he could in an average week

pilfer ten or twelve from her. She was a busy woman with many problems, perhaps a

little naive when it came to her boys, and she never dreamed her eldest would be smoking

at the age of eleven.

Occasionally Kevin, the delinquent two streets over, would sell Mark a pack of stolen

Marlboros for a dollar. But for the most part he had to rely on his mother's skinny

cigarettes.

He had four of them in his pocket that afternoon as he led his brother, Ricky, age eight,

down the path into the woods behind their trailer park. Ricky was nervous about this, his

first smoke. He had caught Mark hiding the cigarettes in a shoebox under his bed day

before, and threatened to tell all if his big brother didn't show him how to do it. They

sneaked along the wooded trail, headed for one of Mark's secret spots where he'd spent

many solitary hours trying to inhale and blow smoke rings.

Most of the other kids in the neighborhood were into beer and pot, two vices Mark was

determined to avoid. Their ex-father was an alcoholic who'd beaten both boys and their

mother, and the beatings always followed his nasty bouts with beer. Mark had seen and

felt the effects of alcohol. He was also afraid of drugs.

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The Summons

Ray Atlee is a professor of law at the University of Virginia. He’s forty-three, newly

single, and still enduring the aftershocks of a surprise divorce. He has a younger brother,

Forrest, who redefines the notion of a family’s black sheep. And he has a father, a very

sick old man who lives alone in the ancestral home in Clanton, Mississippi. He is known

to all as Judge Atlee, a beloved and powerful official who has towered over local law and

politics for forty years. No longer on the bench, the Judge has withdrawn to the Atlee

mansion and become a recluse. With the end in sight, Judge Atlee issues a summons for

both sons to return home to Clanton, to discuss the details of his estate. It is typed by the

Judge himself, on his handsome old stationery, and gives the date and time for Ray and

Forrest to appear in his study. Ray reluctantly heads south, to his hometown, to the place

where he grew up, which he prefers now to avoid. But the family meeting does not take

place. The Judge dies too soon, and in doing so leaves behind a shocking secret known

only to Ray. And perhaps someone else.

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The Pelican Brief

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

someone has read Darby’s brief. Someone who will stop at nothing to destroy the

evidence of an unthinkable crime.

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