This was my second book by John Grisham. The first one was The Street Lawyer. From whatever I had heard of his legal thrillers, I had expected a fast paced narrative with a lot of twists and turns. To say the least, I was disappointed.
It is a story of a young Yale law graduate, Kyle McAvoy, who wants to work in litigation along with his father. But before he could graduate from Yale, a bunch of people start blackmailing him about a video from his past, where he might get implicated for a crime he didn’t commit. So he gets scared and agrees to do whatever they ask him to do. What they ask him to do is pass on insider information with regard to a very important case involving the Pentagon, from the largest corporate firm in the US. So instead of going for litigation after graduation as he wanted, he accepts the job offer at the corporate firm. The story is then about how he bills a lot of hours every week, an office romance with his colleague that no one finds out about and how he hates the long hours and the corporate slavery.
Kyle has to keep meeting the guys who are blackmailing him (his handler). They are good at what they do and keep following him everywhere and have bugged everything from his cellphone to his apartment. Kyle tries to find a way out and is very smart with his plans and his activities during the day so as not to make his handler suspicious. He contacts his old friends who were involved in that video and asks one of them for help. With the friend’s help, he gathers some information and material on his handler. This is what goes on for 3/4th of the book. After which, Kyle decides to go to a criminal lawyer who then contacts the FBI and the Department of Justice. With their help, he tries to ambush his handler but when he arrives at the ambush, the handler isn’t there. He has already fled.
Kyle at the end hints that those goons might have been appointed by the government itself to get sensitive information about the technology involved in the subject matter of that law suit. There is a little twist in the story but it doesn’t really change much except make the goons who blackmail Kyle seem a lot more dangerous.
Personally, I got information about how a corporate law firm works and how the environment is for the first year associates more than I enjoyed following the storyline. Maybe I expected Grisham to deliver a fast paced legal thriller with twists and turns that are entertaining and affect the storyline to it’s core. I expected things to blow up in the climax but nothing happened.
To sum it up, it was a major let down for me.
Musings 