"I bridled a little when my publisher told me this was my best book," says Patterson of his seventh novel. "In many ways 'Degree of Guilt' and 'Eyes of a Child' were more difficult to write. They were told from multiple points of view and they involved social issues more explicitly. Caroline was such a great character I decided to tell the whole story from her viewpoint. But I think 'The Final Judgment' is the book in which I have best realized the vision I had when I started writing it."

Caroline Masters is Patterson's favorite character, and he is proud to say that "she is entirely a product of my imagination." Only one of Patterson's novels, in fact, relies on his own experiences as an attorney. "The Lasko Tangent," which he wrote when he was 29, is based loosely on his work with the Watergate special prosecutor when he was a trial lawyer at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Young as he was when he wrote it, Patterson had already been involved in some heady lawsuits, including one that concerned the state of Ohio's liability in the Kent State shootings. The Watergate case involved Richard Nixon's SEC chief William Casey, who had allegedly called off an investigation of ITT in exchange for political favors. Casey, who went on to serve an even more controversial tenure as Ronald Reagan's CIA director, was never indicted. But Patterson's book, about a hot young Washington lawyer named Christopher Paget who uncovers a stock scam implicating a friend of the President, won the 1979 Edgar Allen Poe Award for best first suspense novel.

Patterson outlined the novel one day on a plane, flying from Birmingham to Denver "for the third week in a row,'' when he realized that the satisfactions of even a very successful legal career could not compensate for what he was losing in the way of a family life. His oldest child, Brooke, who is now in college, was 2 at the time and it was the image of him waving goodbye through the front door that inspired Patterson's first venture into fiction.

Then in 1992, McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen offered its partners a three-month paid vacation. Patterson decided to use his sabbatical to write another book. "Degree of Guilt," in which Christopher Paget returns to defend his son's mother, a television journalist accused of murdering a famous novelist during an interview. The novel was an instant hit and made so much money Patterson was finally able to make fiction writing his full-time occupation.

"I liked practicing law, but I love writing fiction," says Patterson, who works in a sunny studio on the top floor of the remodeled Victorian he shares with his third wife and their combined family of six children.

"In law you are stuck with other people's problems, other people's facts. I can't think of anything that offers you the freedom writing does, to tell the story the way you want to tell it, with nobody else ever telling you what you have to do."