SOURCE: "Book 'Em," in Newsweek, Vol. CXXI, No. 11, March 15, 1993, pp. 79-81.

In the following excerpt from an essay that includes commentary by Grisham, Mathews surveys Grisham's career through The Client and discusses critical response to the author's works.

Grisham is a straight arrow making his way along a very crooked path—a world of sleazy lawyers, fathead politicians and hot-dog G-men where something always stinks just below the surface of wealth and respectability. Grisham's law is as simple as Aesop and as old as Scheherazade: bore 'em and you die. In The Client his hero is Mark Sway, an 11-year-old who tries to stop a suicide only to learn a mob secret that could cost him his life. To save himself from the bad guys—and the good guys—Sway pays $1, all he has, to hire Reggie Love, 52, a street lawyer with a divorcée's past and a...