There and in private practice Grippando worked on a number of appeals in death penalty cases,[3] an experience that later served him in writing his first published novel, The Pardon.
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.
[7][8][9][10] 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.
There are now nineteen novels in the Jack Swyteck series: The Pardon (1994); Beyond Suspicion (2002); Last to Die (2003); Hear No Evil (2004); Got the Look (2006); When Darkness Falls (2007); Last Call (2008); Born to Run (2008); Afraid of the Dark (2011); Blood Money (2013), Black Horizon (2014), Gone Again (2016), Most Dangerous Place (2017), A Death in Live Oak (2018) and The Girl in the Glass Box (2019), The Big Lie (2020), Twenty (2021),Goodbye Girl (2024), and Grave Danger (2025).
Grippando's novels have been published in twenty-eight languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Chinese (simplified), Croatian, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, Spanish, Serbian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Ukrainian.