There are no lawyers or courtrooms in John Grisham’s new thriller. There is not even a single bad guy. The protagonist is Paul, a 35-year-old suburbanite with a pretty wife, three beautiful children, and a tumor quietly swelling in his brain. One day his wife hears a loud thump in the bathroom. “She finds him on the floor,” Grisham writes, “shaking in a full-blown grand mal seizure.” And so begins “The Tumor,” one of the stranger literary digressions in recent memory.

Against the wishes of his agent, editor and publisher, the author famous for (and rich from) legal thrillers, from “The Firm” to “The Rogue Lawyer,” just published a free book whose hero is a medical device called focused ultrasound. Grisham says it’s the most important book of his career. READ MORE: John Grisham thinks his new book is so important he’s giving it away for free | The Washington Post