A Time to Kill (Jake Brigance, #1)

by John Grisham

Billy Ray Cobb was the younger and smaller of the two rednecks.

The opening scene is still hard to take. I can’t read it now. When I wrote it, I didn’t have a daughter. She came two years later. When I saw it on film I had to look away. However, as awful as it is, it was inspired – if that’s the right word – by a real case in rural Mississippi back in the 1970’s. I heard about it when I was in law school.