The Pelican Brief

The Pelican Brief is a legal thriller by the American writer John Grisham, published by Doubleday in 1992. It was his third novel, after A Time to Kill and The Firm, and it was adapted for film in 1993.

The book opens with two killings that shock a divided country. Justice Rosenberg, the liberal, is murdered at his home, and Justice Jensen, appointed by a Republican president and considered a swing vote, is shot inside a cinema in Washington. The assassin is a professional known as Khamel, the most wanted man in his trade, and the lack of any obvious connection between his two employers is what makes the killings impossible to place. Darby Shaw, a law student at Tulane, reads the justices' records and writes a brief arguing that they were not killed for political reasons at all. She shows it to Thomas Callahan, her professor and lover, who passes it to an FBI lawyer he knows, Gavin Verheek. Callahan is then killed by a car bomb, and Darby has to work out who else has read what she wrote and how much they want it to disappear.

The novel moves between Darby's attempts to stay alive, a newspaper investigation and the parts of Washington where the brief's argument is dangerous to know.