#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Compelling . . . another timely tale from John Grisham. [ The Street Lawyer ] shows not only that Grisham has his finger on the public pulse but that he’s also out to prick its conscience.” —Chicago Tribune Michael was in a hurry. He was scrambling up the ladder at Drake & Sweeney, a giant D.C. law firm with eight hundred lawyers. The money was good and getting better; a partnership was no more than three years away. He was a rising star with no time to waste, no time to stop, no time to toss a few coins into the cups of panhandlers. No time for a conscience. Then a violent encounter with a homeless man stopped him cold. Michael survived, but his assailant did not. Who was this man? Michael did some digging and learned that his attacker was a mentally ill veteran who’d been in and out of shelters for many years. Then Michael dug a little deeper and found a dirty secret, and the secret involved Drake & Sweeney. The fast track derailed, the ladder collapsed. Michael bolted the firm and took a top-secret file with him. He landed in the streets, an advocate for the homeless, a street lawyer. And a thief. “Grisham at his plot-driven best.” — The Denver Post “An entertaining read with an important theme . . . The story unfolds in breakneck fashion with those wonderful pages-long passages of taut Grisham dialogue.” — Chicago Sun-Times “The plot surges forward, pulling us along as we turn those pages a mile a minute.” — San Francisco Chronicle “Powerful.” — Richmond Times-Dispatch “ The Street Lawyer hits the ground on a dead run.” — San Diego Union-Tribune “Intricately plotted . . . smoothly told . . . [a] moving exploration of the world of the homeless.” — Publishers Weekly “Riveting.” — Detroit News John Grisham is the author of numerous #1 bestsellers, including The Firm, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Innocent Man, The Whistler, The Boys from Biloxi, and many more. His books have been translated into nearly fifty languages. Grisham is a two-time winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was honored with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction. Grisham serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. Much of his fiction explores deep-seated problems in our criminal justice system. He lives on a farm in central Virginia. One The man with the rubber boots stepped into the elevator behind me, but I didn't see him at first. I smelled him though--the pungent odor of smoke and cheap wine and life on the street without soap. We were alone as we moved upward, and when I finally glanced over I saw the boots, black and dirty and much too large. A frayed and tattered trench coat fell to his knees. Under it, layers of foul clothing bunched around his midsection, so that he appeared stocky, almost fat. But it wasn't from being well fed; in the wintertime in D.C., the street people wear everything they own, or so it seems. He was black and aging--his beard and hair were half-gray and hadn't been washed or cut in years. He looked straight ahead through thick sunglasses, thoroughly ignoring me, and making me wonder for a second why, exactly, I was inspecting him. He didn't belong. It was not his building, not his elevator, not a place he could afford. The lawyers on all eight floors worked for my firm at hourly rates that still seemed obscene to me, even after seven years. Just another street bum in from the cold. Happened all the time in downtown Washington. But we had security guards to deal with the riffraff. We stopped at six, and I noticed for the first time that he had not pushed a button, had not selected a floor. He was following me. I made a quick exit, and as I stepped into the splendid marble foyer of Drake & Sweeney I glanced over my shoulder just long enough to see him standing in the elevator, looking at nothing, still ignoring me. Madam Devier, one of our very resilient receptionists, greeted me with her typical look of disdain. "Watch the elevator," I said. "Why?" "Street bum. You may want to call security." "Those people," she said in her affected French accent. "Get some disinfectant too." I walked away, wrestling my overcoat off my shoulders, forgetting the man with the rubber boots. I had nonstop meetings throughout the afternoon, important conferences with important people. I turned the corner and was about to say something to Polly, my secretary, when I heard the first shot. Madam Devier was standing behind her desk, petrified, staring into the barrel of an awfully long handgun held by our pal the street bum. Since I was the first one to come to her aid, he politely aimed it at me, and I too became rigid. "Don't shoot," I said, hands in the air. I'd seen enough movies to know precisely what to do. "Shut up," he mumbled, with a great deal of composure. The