John Lescroart was born in Houston, Texas and brought up in Texas, New York and Northern California. On graduating from U.C. Berkeley, he did various jobs before becoming a full-time writer, including working as a singer in Europe, a bar tender in an Irish pub in San Francisco and associate director of the Jewish Homes for the Aging in Los Angeles. After doctors estimated he had two hours to live when he contracted meningitis, John Lescroart decided, on his return to health, to take the risk of writing full-time. Two years after that decision, his novel THE 13th JUROR hit the New York Times bestseller list and stayed on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list for three months.