A Painted House by John Grisham (Century, £16.99)

A JOHN GRISHAM book totally devoid of lawyers, judges and jurors. Surely, some mistake. Unfortunately, it's the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Legal eagle Grisham swaps the courtroom for the cotton field in a novel inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas.

The narrator is a seven-year old farm boy called Luke Chandler, and A Painted House is his story of one cotton harvest and his journey from "innocence to experience".

Luke lives with his parents and grandparents on a farm that has never been painted. They farm 80 acres of cotton that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready, they hire a team of Mexicans and workers from the hills to help pick it. The Chandlers are poor, but still manage to treat their harvesters kindly.

There is no television and the highlights of Luke's day are listening to the St Louis Cardinals baseball team on the wireless of an evening and waiting for the postman to arrive with a letter from his uncle Ricky, who is fighting in Korea.

In September 1952, the Mexicans and the hillbilly Spruill family arrive on the same day to pick cotton at the Chandler farm.

When they leave a month or so later, Luke has witnessed two killings, seen a naked woman for the first time and watched a teenage girl give birth.

These, along with the floods which threaten to wreck the cotton, are the high points of A Painted House. The rest is dull, dreary and tedious. In places watching the paint drying on the Chandler's dilapidated farmhouse would have been more interesting.

Think of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, then take out the fun and adventure and you've got A Painted House.

It would seem that Grisham has been aching to write a semi-autobiographical account of his childhood. So hopefully, A Painted House is a one-off, and he can now concentrate on writing those edge-of-the-seat thrillers which have made him the leader of his genre.