The Client

The Client Review

John Grisham’s fourth novel is, by a significant margin, his most inventive in structure. The legal thrillers that made his name — The Firm, The Pelican Brief — centre on lawyers or law students, characters who understand the system they are trapped inside. The Client removes that advantage entirely by placing an eleven-year-old boy at the centre of the machinery. Mark Sway knows nothing about the law except that adults with authority over it are dangerous.

The setup is taut. Mark and his younger brother Ricky are in the woods near Memphis when a drunk lawyer pulls up and begins running a hose from his exhaust pipe into his car. Mark intervenes, talks to the man, and inadvertently learns where the mob buried a murdered United States Senator. The lawyer then kills himself in front of both boys. Ricky goes catatonic with shock. Mark is left holding information that the mob will kill him for and the federal government will subpoena him for, and neither party is offering protection he can actually trust.

Grisham’s genius here is the asymmetry of the conflict. Mark is a smart, streetwise kid from a trailer park — he has no money, no institutional power, no access to the corridors of authority. The antagonists arrayed against him are a Louisiana Mafia family and a publicity-hungry federal prosecutor. The only ally he manages to acquire is Reggie Love, a middle-aged Memphis attorney with a modest practice and genuine conviction.

Reggie is one of Grisham’s best characters: competent without being superhuman, principled without being preachy, and entirely believable as someone who would care about a scared boy that no one else is treating as a person.

The novel moves at Grisham’s characteristic pace — relentless, never overwritten — and the Memphis setting is used with more texture than many of his Southern locations. The Client is the legal thriller for people who think they don’t like legal thrillers.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Grisham at his most inventive. The child-protagonist device works brilliantly, and Reggie Love is one of his finest creations.

Reading Guides

• John Grisham Books in Order: The Complete Reading Guide (2026)
• John Grisham Books Ranked: Best Legal Thrillers to Read First (2026)

Why the Child-Protagonist Works

The decision to make an eleven-year-old the protagonist of a legal thriller is structurally brilliant in ways that only become clear as the novel develops. Mark Sway does not understand attorney-client privilege. He does not understand federal jurisdiction. He does not know what a grand jury is. His ignorance is not a limitation — it is the source of the novel’s tension. Every institutional process Mark encounters is genuinely threatening because he cannot predict or navigate it.

This is the inverse of the professional-insider thriller. In The Firm, Mitch McDeere is a Harvard Law graduate who eventually outsmarts his captors using legal technicalities they didn’t anticipate. In The Pelican Brief, Darby Shaw uses her legal training to analyse her own situation with cold precision. Mark Sway has none of that. He is intelligent and streetwise, but his intelligence operates in the register of a trailer-park kid who has learned to read adults and situations quickly — not in the register of legal sophistication.

Reggie Love and the Practice of Care

Reggie Love is the character who makes the novel complete. She is a middle-aged Memphis attorney with a modest practice — not a brilliant young hotshot, not a crusading reformer, not a courtroom genius. She is someone who has had a difficult life of her own and has arrived at a place in her career where she practices law because she genuinely cares about clients who have no one else.

Her decision to take Mark’s case, and to fight both the federal government and the mob simultaneously, is not depicted as heroism. It is depicted as the natural consequence of being the kind of lawyer she is. Grisham, born in 1955 and a practicing attorney before he became a writer, understands that the legal profession contains people like Reggie Love and that they deserve more fictional attention than they typically receive.

The Memphis Setting

Grisham’s earlier novels are mostly set in Mississippi, and The Client represents his most sustained use of Memphis — a city with its own specific geography of poverty, race, and institutional power. Mark’s family lives in a trailer park; the federal prosecutor is based in a gleaming office building; the mob’s reach extends from Chicago through local proxies. The class geography of the city is integral to the novel’s moral logic.

The 1994 Film and the Novel’s Legacy

The Client was adapted into a film in 1994 starring Tommy Lee Jones as the prosecutor Roy Foltrigg and Susan Sarandon as Reggie Love. The film, directed by Joel Schumacher, captured enough of the novel’s central tension to become a commercial success. Susan Sarandon’s performance in particular brought out the qualities Grisham wrote into Reggie Love: warmth, competence, and a quiet moral seriousness that never tips into sentimentality. The novel was also adapted into a television series in 1995.

The child-protagonist device has been widely imitated since 1993, and rarely as successfully. What makes it work in Grisham’s hands is that Mark is a specific child — not a plot device in a child’s body, but a kid with a particular history, a set of reflexes shaped by specific circumstances, and a voice that is credibly eleven years old throughout.