Back when John Grisham was distributing copies of his first novel, A Time to Kill, to Mississippi bookstores from the trunk of his car, he probably didn’t in his most blissful dreams imagine there’d be a day when its sequel would top most of the nation’s bestseller lists. In the intervening 25 years, however, his second book, The Firm, sold more copies than any other novel of 1991, was followed by a very popular film adaptation, and more bestselling legal thrillers, and more films. And now the author once again returns to the fictitious Deep South hamlet of Clayton, Mississippi, following up on attorney Jake Brigance’s life and practice just three years after his somewhat amazing courtroom victory in A Time to Kill. Without getting too specific and spoilery about that plot, what Brigance defeated was the town’s tendency toward racism, an unpleasant failing still very much in evidence in the new book. In retaliation to his legal win in A Time to Kill, the KKK has burned down his home, killed his dog and just about put him out of business. Then, unpleasantly cantankerous yet progressive-thinking gazillionaire Carl Lee Hailey opts for suicide over years of painful inoperative cancer and, just before hanging himself to a sycamore tree, arranges for Brigance to handle his estate in accordance with a new holographic will that sternly disinherits his son, daughter, and grandchildren in favor of Letitia Lang, a black woman who has been his housekeeper for many years. The children contest the will and, once again, the lawyer finds himself in a deep Dixie courtroom, involved in a trial and struggling against racial bias. Film and television actor Michael Beck has a smooth Southern drawl that he used to great effect on the audio of A Time to Kill. It serves him just as well here in a novel that, possibly reflecting the author’s maturity, is just as compelling and effective as the earlier work without being quite so dramatic or intense.