The Street Lawyer

Zusatztext "Compelling...if there's any justice! The Street Lawyer will be his biggest hit yet." —Entertainment Weekly "An entertaining read with an important theme."— Chicago Sun-Times "The plot surges forward! pulling us along as we turn those pages a mile a minute." – San Francisco Chronicle A Main Selection of the Literary Guild and the Doubleday Book Club Informationen zum Autor 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. Klappentext 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 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. But a violent encounter with a homeless man stopped him cold. Michael survived; his assailant did not. Who was this man? Michael did some digging, and learned that he 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. Leseprobe 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 peopl...

Product details

• Authors: John Grisham, Grisham John
• Publisher: Doubleday Usa
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 16.02.1998
• EAN: 9780385490993
• ISBN: 978-0-385-49099-3
• No. of pages: 352
• Dimensions: 165 mm x 240 mm x 25 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Suspense; FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General, Crime & mystery, Crime and mystery fiction