Grisham goes back to what he writes best, legal thrillers and boy, what a breathless progress of the plot. The nitty-gritty details of Washington D.C. law community and mostly, its corruption is portrayed to the nail and it is hammered in.





The plot traces how a public defender in D.C. is lured, almost threatened to quit his then minimum wage job to open up a farm to settle cases for a shady company without knowing any details of the actual company. The rest is a tale of greed featuring a fast rise to success and faster fall from it. A personal and public life that goes astray, a ruthless media, sharks for lawyers and the tort, class action scenario of America.





Tort lawyers making millions and billions fighting for the people, suing multimillionaire pharmaceutical companies and squeezing out an extensive lawyer’s fee from the settlement and their world of yachts and jets, aspen property, villas in the Caribbean and offshore accounts take over most of the plot of the novel as Clay Carter is sucked into the vortex of this murk from his OPD job. The ambiguous character Max Pace who approaches him at the beginning of the novel finally leads FBI to the new law firm of Clay and lands him in all sorts of trouble with the expanse of the expansion which leads Clay to his bankruptcy.





With a picture perfect relationship gone wrong due to his lack of ambition and her overbearing parents sets the plot in motion and at the opportune moment Tequila Watson appears with his case that begins all the drama that changes Clay’s life. In the end, he, like his father, leaves D.C. for good and settles in with Rebecca after she gets out of the marriage her parents bound her in.





Other than the rather unexpected verdict of the Maxatil case which got a clear not guilty from a jury, a non-explained scenario, the novel is exciting and the writing style keeps the reader glued to the page till the end. The fast paced movement of plot and the foreign locations add to the thrill and the character of French actually shows the weather beaten old wolf of the game of torts, whereas, Clay Carter was really a rookie who bit more than he could swallow and trusted second-hand intelligence a little too much. The predicted fall of JCC is truly tragic considering the conditions he went through and the highs in his career he faced. His escape from America painted a deja vu of his father’s leaving and that was simply fate. The novel ends in a positive note of starting anew in London with the love of his life an the promise of a life not yet burned out.





Clay’s character showed determined attitude and tenacious attributes, if not a little inexperienced and a lot of greed. His arrogance and greed shows when he is at the peak of his career and the despair comes crashing in the subsequent chapters. The catharsis is achieved when he is beat up and ends up in the hospital with broken bones and unable walk for several weeks. A successful legal thriller, detailed and enticing narrative with an insight to the world of lawyers and their scams, the novel is a one-time read, i give it a 3 out of 5.