Press Release
When Darkness FallsFor Immediate Release
Miami attorney Jack Swyteck gets more than he bargained for when he takes on a homeless man as a client in WHEN DARKNESS FALLS (HarperCollins Publishers; $24.95; ISBN: 0-06-0831138; Publication date: January 2, 2007), another pulse-pounding thriller from bestselling author James Grippando. The man who calls himself Falcon is full of contradictions. He lives in a car but he has access to a lot of cash. And he has an obsession with the Miami mayor’s daughter. First, Falcon climbs to the top of the Bay of Biscayne Bridge and threatens to jump unless he can talk to Alina Mendoza. That brings in blind negotiator Vince Paulo, who makes a promise he isn’t allowed to keep, and Falcon ends up in jail. Jack Swyteck doesn’t want Falcon as a client but takes him on as a favor, thinking he’ll plead the guy out and watch his client go to jail. But Falcon has the bail money and is on the street again in a few hours, earning Jack the enmity of the powerful and vindictive mayor.
Then Falcon strikes again. Hours after his release, the body of a brutally murdered woman is found in the trunk of Falcon’s car. On the run, in an attempt to highjack Swyteck and his best friend Theo, he crashes Jack’s car into a motel and takes hostage the woman inside, plus Theo, in the process killing one policeman and injuring another. Jack has mere hours to get Theo and the woman out, because he realizes that Falcon has nothing left to lose. But what Jack doesn’t know is that other people are involved and are keeping dangerous secrets that they will stop at nothing to conceal. Thus begins WHEN DARKNESS FALLS, a lightning-paced, impossible-to-put-down story, as only James Grippando can tell it.
Got The Look
For Immediate Release
"If you haven't read James Grippando, start with Got The Look. It opens with an absolute stunner, then piles on twists and turns... Grippando is really good."
--James Patterson
"Fans of legal thrillers will devour this novel; first-time readers of former trial lawyer Grippando (Hear No Evil) and the Swyteck series will not feel left out. Jack is a wonderful character, and the main mystery is both puzzling and shocking."
--Library Journal
"Grippando sets some of the novel's most gruesome scenes in some of Florida's most stunning settings, including an enormous aquifer, an underwater limestone labyrinth of interconnecting caves…Grippando has a great feel for pacing and writes highly effective, gripping action scenes that will leave readers in suspense until the final page."
--ALA Booklist
"Every woman will read GOT THE LOOK ...and wonder."
--Barbara Taylor Bradford
"This thriller grabs you fast and keeps you glued. Grippando is a major talent and here he's strutting his considerable stuff."
--Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author of The Third Secret
"Pay me what she's worth."
James Grippando's latest thriller mines the South Florida landscape and culture to ask questions about love and fealty--and the terrible price of truth. A kidnapper is on the loose in South Florida targeting the wives of wealthy men, demanding only that they “pay me what she’s worth.” FBI Agent Andie Henning (Under Cover of Darkness, HarperCollins 2000) fears the worst when she sees where the kidnapper has hidden his latest victim, a horsebreeder’s wife. Devil's Ear, the spectacular natural wonder that was one of the most deadly openings to South Florida's aquifer, had claimed the lives of even practiced divers in its labyrinths. How could anyone survive that place? The kidnapper's response to the payment of $1 million—a husband’s determination of his wife’s worth—has recast him as a killer, and one with a motive Andie is desperate to uncover.
James Grippando's novels have been praised for their fierce pace and atmospheric rendering of his South Florida home base. His series on Cuban-Anglo attorney Jack Swyteck has explored issues ranging from capital punishment, the dirty-blood business, chocolate-harvesting child slaves--to the uneasy balances between the public and private lives of men and women. Once a full-time trial lawyer and now of counsel to David Boies’ prestigious law firm, Grippando has battled in courtrooms on behalf of everyone from CEOs and Fortune 500 companies to chicken farmers and death row inmates. The author of ten acclaimed thrillers in the past eleven years, Grippando has created in his hero an everyman, a man in limbo between the Anglo culture he was raised in and the Cuban culture he was denied. His best friend, a former death-row inmate named Theo, supplies the clear vision Swyteck often lacks. Together they cruise through the hothouse atmosphere Grippando sees in the state's heady hybrid mix of high and low culture.
From his first book which was inspired by his own near-arrest (he was mistaken for a peeping-tom),Grippando has created characters and situations that allow him to explore that flash point between passion and civil society. "Now that I write legal thrillers," Grippando reflects, "it's tempting to give in to the insatiable public appetitive for cynical characters who bash the legal system. I try to strike a balance in my novels, and whenever I need to be reminded of the legal system at its best, I think of how Judge Clark (a well-regarded federal appeals judge in Atlanta Grippando clerked for after law school) anguished over every case, trying to do what was right. And now that I spend my workday staring at a computer screen, I have taken to heart one of his favorite old expressions. 'Every lawyer needs a little lookin' out the window time.' Amen to that."
Praised by fellow writers James Patterson and Barbara Taylor Bradford, GOT THE LOOK asks: what is a woman worth to the man who loves her, or who once claimed to love her? Attorney Jack Swyteck is drawn into Andie Henning's case after learning that his latest love interest—Mia Salazar, a woman Jack had thought just might be “the one”—is married. He came face to face with Mia and her husband at a charity event. Still nursing his anger over Mia's deceit, Jack simply decides to face the music when Mia’s husband summons Jack to meet with him and his high-powered attorney. Jack is nervous but doesn't anticipate the challenge -- and threat -- he's handed.
Mia's husband, a wealthy Latin American businessman enraged at Mia's unfaithfulness, and his lawyer tell Jack they want his expert advice on a criminal matter: is a husband required to tell the police his wife is missing? This time, it’s Mia who has disappeared. Salazar has gotten the kidnapper’s signature demand—“pay me what she’s worth”—and he is taking it to heart: he'll pay nothing. But what, Salazar asks, is Jack willing to pay? Jack's luck with women has never been good: now it is taken the most deadly turn ever.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: James Grippando is the bestselling author of nine previous novels including Hear No Evil, Last to Die, Beyond Suspicion, A King's Ransom, Under Cover of Darkness, Found Money, The Abduction, The Informant, and The Pardon. The next twelve months will be a banner publishing year for the author. He will publish four new novels including GOT THE LOOK; Lying with Strangers, an original thriller for Bertelsmann Bookclubs and a Main Selection of the Book of the Month Club, Literary Guild, and Doubleday Book Club; Leapholes, a young adult novel which will be published by the American Bar Association (a first for the organization) and that will be a selection of the Children’s Book of the Month Club; and Book 6 in the Swyteck series, which is already written. Grippando fans can also enjoy in 2006 the general release by HarperCollins of Lying with Strangers; a two-in-one trade paperback featuring The Pardon and Beyond Suspicion, the first two novels in the Swyteck series; the mass market release of GOT THE LOOK; and an original short story in an anthology featuring many of today’s top thriller writers. Born and raised outside of Chicago Grippando now lives in Florida with his family.
GOT THE LOOK
James Grippando
HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: January 2006
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 0-06-05645-X
Press Release
Hear No EvilFor Immediate Release
“A tight, smartly constructed mystery that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.” -- Booklist
The year 2004 marks a decade since of the publication of James Grippando’s first novel, The Pardon. Nine novels later, Grippando’s fans still clamor for the hero of that blockbuster debut’s Miami lawyer Jack Swyteck. An immediate hit with readers, Beyond Suspicion’s reintroduction of Swyteck garnered a starred Booklist review that compared Grippando to John Grisham and said, “If further Swyteck adventures are anything like this one, keep ‘em comin’.” Last to Die was called “the third and best in Grippando’s Jack Swyteck series,” by the Orlando Sentinel and the Miami Herald cried “we want more!” Reviewers most certainly agree that Grippando’s “nail-biting style,” (USA Today) always “wins you over,” (Chicago Tribune). In August, The New York Times bestselling author brings back Jack Swyteck in Hear No Evil (Hardcover; July 27, 2004; $23.95), as he tackles a case that begins with a murder at the famed military base, Guantanamo Bay, and concludes with a shocking surprise that will change Jack’s life forever.
Hear No Evil is yet another gripping thriller in the ‘Grippando style’ that has developed over the years, one that juxtaposes an air of realism with page-turning suspense. For each novel, Grippando takes a headline-grabbing issue and weaves it into his plot. This time, getting back to the local interests of his Miami roots, he explores the interaction of U.S. military forces and Cuban citizens on the neighboring, yet oppositional, perimeters of Guantanamo Bay.
In Hear No Evil, a beautiful woman comes to see criminal lawyer Jack Swyteck and begs him to represent her. She says she’s about to be arrested for the murder of her husband, an officer stationed at Guantanamo. Having no expertise in military law and sensing that the woman isn’t telling him the entire truth, Jack turns her down. Then she drops a bombshell: she claims she’s the adoptive mother of Jack’s biological son -- a child he’s never met. Either Jack must represent her or he’ll never see the boy. So Jack takes the case, with great foreboding. He has an unreliable client -- a blackmailer who just might be a murderer -- and further, he has to travel to Havana to tussle with people who clearly have a lot to hide. A case with as many twists and turns as it has unanswered questions; Jack may have to confront his own son on the witness stand before he can learn the truth.
Hear No Evil
by James Grippando
Harpercollins Publishers; Hardcover
Publication Date: August 1, 2004
ISBN: 060564571
$23.95
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