John Grisham, The Summons

In this 2002 return to Clanton, Mississippi, Grisham takes a bit of a departure from his more typical legal-thriller style. Ray Atlee, a law professor from Virginia, gets a rather cryptic "summons" from his ailing retired-judge father regarding the disposition of his estate. Ray arrives to find his father dead on the couch, and he soon discovers boxes and boxes of cash in the study cabinets. So Ray is set on a mission to figure out where all this cash came from (some shady dealings by his father?), and what to do with it (divide it with his in-and-out-of-rehab brother, declare it to the government?). The action picks up as Ray discovers that someone else must know about the cash too, as they stalk around the house, and later break into his Virginia apartment. Though not Grisham's best work (that's a pretty high standard), I still really enjoyed this book. The writing is good, the characters and setting interesting, and the mystery agreeably opaque.