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.

Jake Brigance has never met Seth Hubbard, or even heard of him, until the old man's suicide note naes him attorney for his estate. The will is dynamite. Seth has left ninety percent of his vast, secret fortune to his housemaid. The vultures are circling even before the body is cold: the only thing more incendiary than money in Ford County is race, and this case has both. As the relatives contest thewill, Jake searches for answers to the many questions left by Seth Hubbard's death ...

#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 two weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist high to my father, almost 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 the new novel from John Grisham, a story inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a seven year old farm boy named Luke Chandler, 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. A Painted House is a moving story of one boy's journey from innocence to experience.

A public defender takes an unwanted murder case and stumbles across a horrible pharmaceutical conspiracy.

Contemporary / British English In Washington, two Supreme Court judges are murdered and only the young and beautiful law student Darby Shaw knows why. She has uncovered a deadly secret but will anyone believe her? Can she stay alive long enough to persuade them she is right?

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