James Grippando

Born in Waukegan, Illinois and raised in the rural area of Antioch, Illinois (north of Chicago), James Michael Grippando is the son of James Vincent (of Italian and Irish heritage) and Gloria Marie (of German and Czech heritage) Grippando. Raised as a Roman Catholic in a family of five children (three sisters, one brother), Grippando graduated from Antioch Community High School in 1976, attended the University of Illinois for one year, and then transfered to the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he earned his B.A. in 1980 and his J.D. in 1982.

From August 1983 to August 1984, Grippando served as law clerk to the Honorable Thomas A. Clark, United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta. There and in private practice Grippando worked on a number of appeals in death penalty cases, an experience that later served him in writing his first novel, The Pardon. From September 1984 through September 1996, Grippando was a trial lawyer in Miami. In a David vs. Goliath legal battle that lasted seven years, Grippando served as lead counsel on behalf of Florida chicken farmers in a case that was "the catalyst for wholesale change in the $15 billion-a-year [poultry] industry."

As a lawyer, Grippando wrote numerous scholarly articles. In the late 1980s, he shifted to creative writing, but his first attempt at Fiction was never published. A near arrest in a case of mistaken identity sparked an idea for a new novel about a man accused of a murder that he may not have committed Grippando's first published novel, The Pardon, was released in hardcover in September 1994, where he first introduced the character Jack Swyteck, a Miami criminal defense lawyer. Grippando wrote one more novel while still practicing law: The Informant was published in October 1996. He then left the law to write full time.