My father practiced law in Mt Vernon, New York, on Fiske Place, directly above the train tracks. Lawyers from that building liked to point thumbs at the disembarking passengers and say they couldn’t wait to charge them “whatever the traffic will bear” — the first law joke I ever got, after it was explained — but not Dad, a Mt Vernon boy who watched his town get blacker and poorer and allowed many clients to pay what they could afford.

He was a lawyer John Grisham would have admired. Grisham likes street lawyers, forgotten lawyers, almost lawyers, tempted lawyers, virtuous lawyers, lawyers frustrated by their decency, unhappy lawyers, shamed lawyers, small-town and small-office and lost lawyers — them, most of all. He would have frowned when my dad told me to pursue “real money” in corporate law, although he would have understood. At the start of “Sycamore Row,” Grisham’s 26th adult novel and one of his finest, attorney Jake Brigance needs money bad.

“Sycamore Row” is a true literary event — the sequel, nearly a quarter-century later, to “A Time to Kill,” Grisham’s first and perhaps best-regarded novel. The sequel, surprisingly, doesn’t take place in the present, with Jake almost 60 and racially simmering Clanton, Mississippi, inching closer to the inevitable year when minorities will be the majority in the United States. Instead, this grand, refreshing book is set in 1988, advancing Jake’s story barely three years from the Carl Lee Hailey trial that was the centerpiece of “A Time to Kill.” At the book’s end, Jake reluctantly conceded that he “was not meant for the big time,” and groused about what a sap he was for taking just US$900 to defend Hailey, the black father who avenged the all-day rape and attempted drowning of his 10-year-old daughter — one of the most astonishing and visceral pieces of American writing ever set down — by assassinating the two human-mopwaters who perpetrated it. Jake still sees the rectitude in that defense, and warms himself, a bit excessively, in the reverence of the local black community. But — a capital case for US$900! The figure comes up a lot.

Air of frustration

These days, Jake spends, maybe, too much time setting traps to catch his secretary coming in late. And debating whether it might be smart to leave Clanton, since some of the Klansmen who torched his house are starting to come up for parole. The Reagan/Bush FBI isn’t returning his calls. So Jake’s carrying. He’s got a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol in his briefcase, another gun in his car, more in his office. His marriage, which might have dissolved, has not. But he and his wife and daughter are living on top of one another in a tiny box because the genius 35-year-old trial attorney has been outmaneuvered by his insurance company. An air of frustration coats him. You can’t entirely blame him for thinking he’s Job in a red Saab he can’t afford to upgrade.

The case that reclaims Jake is a contested will by a timberman and semi-loner named Seth Hubbard, who writes it, then hangs himself. Seth was clearly hated by his family. When they learn how much he was worth (US$20 million, give or take), they like him a lot more. Then they discover his new will lops them all out. Grisham has favored the lopping will in his plots before — in “The Rainmaker,” his sixth book, and “The Testament,” his 10th. When the lawyers, many lawyers, gather to feed, Jake has the honor of representing the new will; Seth chose him because he respected the Hailey defense. But when the other side offers to talk settlement, integrity-first Jake isn’t in such a rush because he wants to stretch his payday. Meanwhile, with proponents of different will variations planning to leave their spouses once the loot is divvied, the trial commences in Chancery Court, and two problems keep palpitating. “Testamentary capacity” — how nuts was cancer-riddled Seth at the end? (Unable to resist a last tag, Seth had inserted his fervent hope that his ex-wives “perish in pain.”) And “undue influence.” He leaves almost all his money to his attractive, middle-aged black housekeeper, Lettie, who claims to be surprised. Others are less sure.

Jake’s mentor compelling

Jake’s mentor, Lucien Wilbanks, a brilliant but disbarred lawyer and active drunk, sobers up to remind Jake what’s at stake. “Everything is about race in Mississippi,” he says. “A simple black woman on the verge of inheriting what might be the largest fortune this county has ever seen, and the decision rests with a jury that’s predominantly white. It’s race and money, Jake, a rare combination around here.” Lucien knows what he’s talking about. The grandson of Robert E. Lee Wilbanks, he joined a black church during the civil rights era, sits in the black section at the courthouse (officially abolished but a tradition upheld) and is keen to explain, “I’m one of at least a dozen whites in this county not blinded by racism.” Lucien is so compelling he hijacks the narrative midway as Jake recedes. In “A Time to Kill,” which asked whether any crime is so heinous that taking a life for it is acceptable, Jake was the focus and fury. But Grisham didn’t wait all these years to do another “Jake book,” which explains why he treats Jake less sympathetically in “Sycamore Row.” He’s after a portrait of the whole ecosystem of Clanton, where car phones are popping up but a bank remains “notorious for avoiding black customers.”

“Sycamore Row” reminds us that the best legal fiction is written by lawyers — Grisham, Scott Turow (who still practices), Louis Auchincloss, the Michigan judge William Coughlin — but this novel is unavoidably, and thankfully, about far more than just probating a will. Law is indistinguishable from the history of race in the South. Law bound slaves to their masters, and law freed them. An indelible image from “To Kill a Mockingbird” (the book, not the movie) is Calpurnia, the cook, describing how she teaches her son to read using Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws of England.” In “Sycamore Row” the law burdens us with secrets that must be revealed, but the most brutal acts can be balanced by an unexpected act of salvation — not unlike the night Boo Radley came out.

“Sycamore Row” could’ve shed a couple of its burpy suburbanisms (like “restroom”), Ole Miss foobah-isms and goyim naches over Christmas morning, and some readers will be chagrined not to learn what happened to several important characters from “A Time to Kill.” This is not a fanatical sequel. Indeed, after his first book, Grisham went 13 novels before returning to Clanton as a main setting, but he seems now to land there every five books or so. The trial in “Sycamore Row” is presided over by the judge who keeled over on his sofa a dozen books ago in “The Summons,” but in this book only his wife and maid are dead, leaving a messy, dusty man and house.

So Grisham may decide to come back to Jake again. Or need to. Or Grisham can let it rest here. If Jake never quite becomes the man we want him to, who in hell ever does?