| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780385339599 | | Publisher: Random House Inc | | Publish Date: 4/10/2007 | | Buy.com Sku: 31193175 | | Item#: R3T2WU | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8H x 5L x 0.5T | | Pages: 288 |
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| | | Once Judge Atlee was a powerful figure in Clanton, Mississippi--a pillar of the community who towered over local law and politics for forty years. Now the judge is a shadow of his former self, a sick, lonely old man who has withdrawn to his sprawling ancestral home. Knowing 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 eldest, a Virginia law professor, newly single and still enduring the aftershocks of a surprise divorce. Forrest is Ray's younger brother, who redefines the notion of a 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 where he grew up and 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 someone else. "From the Paperback edition.
Annotation:
John Grisham returns to Ford County, Mississippi, the setting of his earlier thriller A TIME TO KILL, for another dark and suspenseful tale of Southern small-town secrets.
| PraiseLos Angeles Times
"John Grisham is at his best when he's plotting heavily, tossing his characters into dire straits and then pulling out the stops to save them, all the while weaving in details of legal precedence, and playing with the gray area between the letter of the law and its spirit.... In THE SUMMONS, he returns in all his Grisham glory, complete with lawyers both good and bad, legal issues to be pondered and the delightful suspense that keep us flipping the pages." - Bernadette Murphy 02/26/2002New York Times Book Review
"Grisham tells his tale in a bright, knowing style that owes something to country music. His evocation of small-town life in rural Mississippi can be deft, but the action that makes up the bulk of the book is disjointed and repetitive." - Adam Liptak 02/24/2002 |
| Author Bio| John Grisham | | John Grisham woke up at 5:00 every morning for three years to complete his first novel, A TIME TO KILL. Working as a lawyer and a member of Mississippi's state legislature, Grisham published his debut thriller with a small and somewhat unknown publisher, receiving only local readership in his home state. He finally burst on to the national scene with his second novel, THE FIRM, a legal thriller that sold millions of copies and stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 47 weeks. Shortly afterward, Grisham moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he began working on a series of new legal thrillers, including THE PELICAN BRIEF and THE CLIENT, all of which became bestsellers and were subsequently made into successful films. Having graduated from Ole Miss with a law degree in 1981, Grisham went on to base his popular thrillers on his experience as a specialist in criminal defense. His once-unknown debut, A TIME TO KILL, was made into a major motion picture in 1996. |
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