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Meeting Up With...James Grippando
About James Grippando
James Grippando was born north of Chicago and raised in rural Illinois. In his first job out of law school Grippando served as law clerk to the Honorable Thomas A. Clark, United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta. There and in private practice Grippando worked on a number of appeals in death penalty cases,[2] an experience that later served him in writing his first published novel, The Pardon.[3] From September 1984 to September 1996, Grippando was a trial lawyer in Miami. In a David vs. Goliath legal battle that lasted seven years, Grippando served as lead counsel on behalf of Florida chicken farmers in a case that was "the catalyst for wholesale change in the $15 billion-a-year [poultry] industry."[4]
As a lawyer, Grippando wrote numerous scholarly articles. In the late 1980s, he shifted to creative writing, but his first attempt at fiction was never published.[5] A near arrest in a case of mistaken identity sparked an idea for a new novel about a man accused of a murder that he may not have committed.[6][7][8][9] Grippando's first published novel, The Pardon, was released in hardcover in September 1994, where he first introduced the character Jack Swyteck, a Miami criminal defense lawyer.[10] Grippando wrote one more novel while still practicing law: The Informant (October 1996.)[11] He then left the law to write full time,[5] and a string of novels followed: The Abduction (1998); Found Money (1999); Under Cover of Darkness (2000); A King's Ransom (2001); Beyond Suspicion (2002); Last to Die (2003); Hear No Evil (2004); Got the Look (2006); Leapholes (for young adults) (2006); When Darkness Falls (2007); Lying with Strangers (2007); Last Call (2008); Born to Run (2008); and Intent to Kill (2009). Beyond Suspicion marked the return of character Jack Swyteck, and since then, all but Leapholes, Lying with Strangers and Intent to Kill have been in the Jack Swyteck series.