Framed

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The master of the legal thriller” (Associated Press) teams up with “the godfather of the innocence movement” (Texas Monthly) to share ten harrowing true stories of wrongful convictions. “Each of these stories is told with astonishing power.”—David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon “Gripping . . . compelling . . . What makes [Framed] important reading isn’t the shock value advertised in the title. It’s the exposure of the infuriating, recurrent factors involved in so many unrighteous convictions.”—The Washington Post John Grisham is known worldwide for his bestselling novels, but it’s his real-life passion for justice that led to his work with Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries, the first organization dedicated to exonerating innocent people who have been wrongly convicted. Together they offer an inside look at the many injustices in our criminal justice system. A fundamental principle of our legal system is a presumption of innocence, but once someone has been found guilty, there is very little room to prove doubt. These ten true stories shed light on Americans who were innocent but found guilty and forced to sacrifice friends, families, and decades of their lives to prison while the guilty parties remained free. In each of the stories, John Grisham and Jim McCloskey recount the dramatic hard-fought battles for exoneration. They take a close look at what leads to wrongful convictions in the first place and the racism, misconduct, flawed testimony, and corruption in the court system that can make them so hard to reverse. Impeccably researched and told with page-turning suspense as only John Grisham can deliver, Framed is the story of winning freedom when the battle already seems lost and the deck is stacked against you. Look for John Grisham’s forthcoming legal thriller, The Widow. This time, the verdict isn’t the end of the story.

John Grisham is the author of fifty consecutive #1 bestsellers, which have been translated into nearly fifty languages. His recent books include Camino Ghosts, The Exchange: After the Firm, and his third Jake Brigance novel, A Time for Mercy, which is being developed by HBO as a limited series. Grisham is a two-time winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was honored with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction. When he’s not writing, Grisham serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project and of Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. Much of his fiction explores deep-seated problems in our criminal justice system. Grisham lives on a farm in central Virginia. Jim McCloskey founded Centurion Ministries, the first organization in the world devoted to freeing the wrongly convicted. Since its establishment forty years ago, Centurion has freed seventy individuals, all of whom spent decades in prison serving life or death sentences for the crimes of others. McCloskey has a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. His memoir, When Truth Is All You Have, was published by Doubleday in 2020.