The Client was published by Doubleday in 1993, Grisham’s fourth novel and another immediate bestseller. The protagonist is Mark Sway, an eleven-year-old from a Memphis trailer park who witnesses the suicide of a Mafia lawyer — and who, before dying, the lawyer tells where the body of a murdered U.S. senator is buried. Now Mark knows too much: the Mafia wants him dead, and an ambitious federal prosecutor wants to compel his testimony regardless of the danger.
Grisham’s innovation is to tell a legal thriller from a child’s perspective — Mark is smart, resourceful, and terrified, navigating a legal system that has no mechanism for protecting him. His only ally is Reggie Love, a struggling female attorney who takes his case pro bono and fights both the Mafia and the federal government to keep him alive.
The novel explores the gap between the law’s abstract principles (the right to counsel, protection from self-incrimination, the state’s duty to protect children) and the law’s actual practice (where ambitious prosecutors, overworked public defenders, and indifferent judges conspire to make the vulnerable more vulnerable). Mark’s youth makes the system’s failures more visible: an adult might navigate the bureaucracy, but a child is helpless before it.
The 1994 film starred Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones.
Collecting The Client
First edition (Doubleday, New York, 1993): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in fine jacket: $20–$50
- Signed first edition: $60–$150
- Reading copy without jacket: $3–$8