Patrick Berthon Books

Eleven-year-old Mark Sway witnesses the bizarre suicide of a New Orleans attorney and is left with a deadly secret concerning the recent murder of a Louisiana senator.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A pillar of the community who towered over local law and politics for forty years, Judge Atlee is now a shadow of his former self—a sick, lonely old man who has withdrawn to his sprawling ancestral home in Clanton, Mississippi. Knowing that the end is near, Judge Atlee has issued a summons for his two sons to return to Clanton to discuss his estate. Ray Atlee is the elder, a Virginia law professor, newly single, still enduring the aftershocks of a surprise divorce. Forrest is Ray’s younger brother, the family’s black sheep. The summons 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 he now prefers 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 to someone else. Don’t miss John Grisham’s new book, THE EXCHANGE: AFTER THE FIRM!

#1 "NEW YORK TIMES" BESTSELLER In the town of Ada, Oklahoma, Ron Williamson was going to be the next Mickey Mantle. But on his way to the Big Leagues, Ron stumbled, his dreams broken by drinking, drugs, and women. Then, on a winter night in 1982, not far from Ron s home, a young cocktail waitress named Debra Sue Carter was savagely murdered. The investigation led nowhere. Until, on the flimsiest evidence, it led to Ron Williamson. The washed-up small-town hero was charged, tried, and sentenced to death in a trial littered with lying witnesses and tainted evidence that would shatter a man s already broken life, and let a true killer go free. Impeccably researched, grippingly told, filled with eleventh-hour drama, John Grisham s first work of nonfiction reads like a page-turning legal thriller. It is a book that will terrify anyone who believes in the presumption of innocence a book no American can afford to miss."

"The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist-high to my father, over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a 'good crop'." Thus begins from author John Grisham, a story inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy named Luke Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it. For six weeks they pick cotton, battling the heat, the rain, the fatigue, and, sometimes, each other. As the weeks pass Luke sees and hears things no seven-year-old could possibly be prepared for, and finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever. This is a moving story of one boy's journey from innocence to.

In this gripping legal thriller, Clay Carter, a public defender, takes on a seemingly ordinary murder case that spirals into a shocking conspiracy involving a major pharmaceutical company. As he uncovers the truth, Clay faces life-altering stakes that could elevate him to the pinnacle of the legal world.

When the Supreme Court's most liberal and most conservative justices are gunned down, law student Darby Shaw builds a case against a powerful suspect, whose threats send her underground.

Presents a novel about high school football in a small Texas town, a place in which football has become a religion.

Trumble is a minimum security federal prison, home to the usual assortment of relatively harmless criminals - drug dealers, bank robbers, swindlers, embezzlers, tax evaders, and three former judges who call themselves The Brethren. They meet each day in t