If Suits is your frontrunner on the TV Shows list, John Grisham should be the frontrunner on your Books list.
The Partner by John Grisham: sort of a review
Patrick ought to count his blessings that Vakeel Vandumurugan didn’t handle his case because if he was, Patrick would be dead lang syne, that too for the second time.
Now, The Partner is a serious, racy novel plethoric with legal innuendos, long names (too many of them too to keep track of, in fact), shrewd, savvy characters and an exalting case charged for murder and robbery on a man who returned from the dead, all packed in 410 pages (actually depends on the edition you choose) under John Grisham’s finesse. Patrick Lanignan, a young lawyer was found dead (with a pelvic bone for evidence, since his car caught fire and burned to a near wipeout) by the interstates of Biloxi, they buried him under a sizable tree, sniffled and sobbed for him and went on with their lives after his memorial service. The only person happy for this tragic cataclysm was his wife, Trudy who gained two million dollars on his insurance that she never knew about. Four years later, a high-end detective agency finds him in the countryside of Brazil, getting ready for his morning jog. Grisham then reveals that Patrick (or Danilo, his Brazilian alter ego) had pulled a Brobdingnagian heist of ninety million dollars right before he faked his own death.
He is captured by the detective agency to be tortured remorselessly on repeated questioning of the whereabouts of the money he stole. The news about the capture of the dead man on the run brought back slews of interested groups; the FBI (they were just curious but well, they’re the FBI), Benny Aricia (they man who owned the ninety million dollars), Patrick/Danilo’s ex partners of the legal firm he worked for pre-death, the insurance company that paid up two million dollars to his wife, the guy his wife was cheating on and basically, the town of Biloxi on a whole with many question on their mind but the soundest one being – whose pelvic bone was that the State police found then?. And to further surprise, barely a million out of the ninety million dollars stash were spent by Patrick. He lived tight and miserly in Brazil, with all the dough.
Only through few more pages comes to light that there is a completely extraneous reason for this heist. Patrick and his confidante, a Brazilian lawyer unravel the mystery like opening some fruit; peeling off one layer at a time to Patrick’s newly recruited lawyer, Sandy who is also an old friend, a classmate from college and a pallbearer in his funeral to defend him against his multiple capital charges. Writing further about this book would do injustice to you if you are planning on reading it and injustice to the movie (Water for Elephants, yeah I’m watching just now and for the first time) that I’ve kept on Pause.
I’ll end with this – towards the last chapter of the book, Patrick’s capital charge of a maximum thirty years of incarceration gets dropped and plummets down to a penalty of maximum one-year imprisonment for something he did (avoiding a spoiler alert here). This book was like reading Suits; if Harvey was charged and Michael defended him; only a hundred times better. And it ends with a sudden turnabout of events that you don’t see coming. I wouldn’t rank it above the Rainmaker or A Time To Kill but this is on par with the Street Lawyer and fairly good book.
rafagurrl 