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The Client by John Grisham

The Client

“Absorbing . . . Wildly original . . . His best book yet.”

—The Wall Street Journal

About the Book

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • In a weedy lot on the outskirts of Memphis, two  boys watch a shiny Lincoln pull up to the  curb....

Eleven-year-old Mark Sway and his younger brother were sharing a forbidden cigarette when a chance encounter with a suicidal lawyer left Mark knowing  a bloody and explosive secret: the whereabouts of  the most sought-after dead body in America.

Now Mark is caught between a legal system gone mad and a mob killer desperate to cover up his crime. And his only ally is a woman named Reggie Love, who has been a lawyer for all of four years. Prosecutors are  willing to break all the rules to make Mark talk. The  mob will stop at nothing to keep him quiet. And  Reggie will do anything to protect her clienteven take a last, desperate gamble that could win  Mark his freedom... or cost them both their  lives.

Read an Excerpt

ONE

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 this 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 shoe box under his bed yesterday, 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...

Excerpted from The Client by John Grisham. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Praise

"Heart -pounding!"

The Orlando  Sentinel

"Grisham is  an absolute master!"

The  Washington Post

"Engrossing!"

San Francisco Chronicle

"Absorbing... Wildly original... His best book yet."  

Cosmopolitan

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