Scott Turow and other contemporary lawyer-authors always serve as fruitful comparison-contrasts with Grisham.

Previous to The Rainmaker, the most well-known novel about a civil lawsuit is The Verdict by Barry Reed (1980), source for the celebrated 1982 film written by David Mamet and starring Paul Newman. Reed, a member of the Massachusetts bar, had co-authored two nonfiction studies of medicine and the law and focuses his novel on a medical malpractice suit. Reed's main character is older and more jaded than Rudy Baylor, yet both books describe how the lawyers react emotionally to complex cases in which they face wellfinanced, powerful adversaries. Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action (1995), about a Massachusetts lawyer's suit on behalf of leukemia victims against a company accused of spewing dangerous pollution, offers a real-life contemporary case to contrast to Grisham's novel.

In his profile in People Weekly (March 16, 1992), Grisham professed a high school enthusiasm...