 Don't Miss
More at Powell's
Interviews | December 15, 2009
By Jill Owens
 Eoin Colfer is best known for his bestselling Artemis Fowl series, which inspires fanatical devotion in its fans. Entertainment Weekly raved: "The...
Continue »
-
 |
$10.50 List price: $27.95
Used Hardcover
Ships in 1 to 3 days
| Qty |
Store |
Section |
| 9 |
Local Warehouse |
Mystery- A to Z |
More copies of this ISBN: -
Used, Hardcover, $8.50
-
Used, Hardcover, $12.95
-
Used, Hardcover, $14.95
-
Used, Hardcover, $7.95
-
Used, Hardcover, $9.50
-
Used, Hardcover, $9.95
-
Used, Hardcover, $19.50
-
New, Hardcover, $27.95
This title in other formats: -
New, Mass market, $9.99
-
Used, Mass market, $3.95
-
Used, Mass market, $5.95
-
Used, Mass market, $6.95
-
Used, Hardcover, $12.95
-
New, Trade paper, $27.95
-
New, Compact disc, $31.95
-
Used, Compact disc, $19.95
-
New, Compact disc, $44.95
-
Used, Compact disc, $24.95
-
New, Mass market, $13.50
-
New, Trade paper, $12.89
-
New, Trade paper, $12.89
-
New, Hardcover, $31.50
-
New, Mass market, $21.50
-
New, Cd-audio, $28.00
-
New, Audio cassette, $23.00
The Associate
by John Grisham
|
|
|
|
Synopses & Reviews Kyle McAvoy grew up in his father's small-town law office in York, Pennsylvania. He excelled in college, was elected editor-in-chief of The Yale Law Journal, and his future has limitless potential.
But Kyle has a secret, a dark one, an episode from college that he has tried to forget. The secret, though, falls into the hands of the wrong people, and Kyle is forced to take a job he doesn't want — even though it's a job most law students can only dream about.
Three months after leaving Yale, Kyle becomes an associate at the largest law firm in the world, where, in addition to practicing law, he is expected to lie, steal, and take part in a scheme that could send him to prison, if not get him killed.
With an unforgettable cast of characters and villains — from Baxter Tate, a drug-addled trust fund kid and possible rapist, to Dale, a pretty but seemingly quiet former math teacher who shares Kyle's "cubicle" at the law firm, to two of the most powerful and fiercely competitive defense contractors in the country — and featuring all the twists and turns that have made John Grisham the most popular storyteller in the world, The Associate is vintage Grisham. Review: "Bestseller Grisham's contemporary legal thriller offers an action-and-suspense plot reminiscent of that of his breakout book, 1991's The Firm, in contrast to 2008's didactic The Appeal, which served as a platform for his concerns about the corrupting effects of judicial elections. Kyle McAvoy, a callow Yale Law School student, dreams of a public service gig on graduation, until shadowy figures blackmail him with a videotape that could revive a five-year-old rape accusation. Instead of helping those in need, McAvoy accepts a position at a huge Wall Street firm, Scully & Pershing, whose clients include a military contractor enmeshed in a $800 billion lawsuit concerning a newly-designed aircraft. McAvoy can avoid exposure of his past if he feeds his new masters inside information on the case. Readers should be prepared for some predictable twists, an ending with some unwarranted ambiguity and some unconvincing details (the idea that a secret file room in a high stakes litigation case would be closed from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. every night stretches credulity to the breaking point). Still, Grisham devotees should be satisfied, even if this is one of his lesser works." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: In 2005, as part of an Alcoholics Anonymous recovery program, a Las Vegas man wrote letters of apology to people he might have harmed in his drinking days. One letter went to a woman who in 1984 had claimed that he raped her at a fraternity party when they were students at the University of Virginia, only to have her charges dismissed by police and school officials. But given the man's admission in ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) his letter, the woman called police, and he was charged with rape; after plea bargaining, he served six months in a Virginia prison for a lesser offense. The case was extensively reported in Charlottesville, where the novelist John Grisham now lives, and he has made a fictional version of it central to "The Associate," his 21st novel. When we meet Grisham's hero, Kyle McAvoy, the onetime Eagle Scout and star athlete is editor of the Yale Law Journal and fielding offers from prestigious law firms that want to hire him as a $200,000-a-year associate. However, the idealistic Kyle plans to do legal-aid work with migrant workers before joining a huge New York firm, Scully & Pershing. Then Kyle is visited by a sinister fellow who calls himself Bennie Wright and knows the one skeleton in his closet. Three years earlier, when he was a senior in college, Kyle and three fraternity brothers, after a long day of drinking, wound up in his apartment with a freshman girl. Two of the boys had sex with her, and one of them recorded the episode with his cellphone camera. Kyle didn't participate, but he was there, and Bennie, who has somehow acquired the video, threatens to make it public. He warns that Kyle could be charged as an accessory to rape — because the girl may have passed out during the encounter. At best, Kyle's legal career would be ruined; at worst, Kyle and his friends would go to prison. Bennie has come for blackmail, and the agonized Kyle decides he has no choice but to meet his demands. Kyle will forget about migrant workers and join Scully & Pershing, where he will serve as Bennie's spy, smuggling out confidential documents from a multibillion-dollar lawsuit between two defense industry giants. The rest of the novel has two main themes. The first highlights the horrors of being an associate in a powerful law firm. The associates are expected to work 50 to 100 hours a week, for which the clients are billed $300 an hour ($400 after the associates pass the bar). The work is boring and often pointless. It's a running joke that clients are billed for the time used when the lawyers have lunch, have sex or drive around looking for a parking place. The partners in the firm, who are paid well over a million dollars a year, are smart, cynical, greedy and dishonest. Kyle soon hates his job, as do most of the associates, and Grisham makes a persuasive case that their lives are hell on Earth. The other theme is Kyle's reluctant role as Bennie's spy. Grisham lays it on thick here. Bennie and his thuggish colleagues follow Kyle around town, install bugs and cameras in his apartment, and gain access to his phones and e-mail. Kyle seeks to escape Bennie's grip, but it's a given in this sort of thriller that he won't do the sensible thing and go to the FBI. His plight is complicated when one of his fraternity brothers, after serious alcohol and drug abuse, joins AA and decides to write a letter of apology to the girl he now admits he raped. Kyle begs him not to do so, warning that nothing good can come of a confession. He's right. Grisham has long since proved his narrative talent. His plot is highly fanciful, and he makes it easy for us to keep flipping the pages to see if Kyle can find a way out of this mess. He mostly writes clean, workmanlike prose, but I have one stylistic complaint about the novel. It's important to Grisham not only that Kyle be seen as noble, but also that his tormentor be a rat. Thus, as Bennie spits out his nefarious demands, we're variously told that he speaks "with a sneer," with a "smart-ass grin," with a "silly smirk." Enough already; we get it. Grisham has achieved astonishing success by writing contrived novels — like this one — about shady dealings in the legal world. In this decade, however, he has expanded his horizons. He published his first book of nonfiction, "The Innocent Man," a serious look at a miscarriage of justice in Oklahoma. He has also published four novels that don't involve lawyers: "A Painted House," about growing up poor in Arkansas; "Bleachers," about high school football; "Skipping Christmas," about the horrors of life without Christmas; and "Playing for Pizza," about an American football player in Italy. Grisham clearly wants to stretch his talent, but legal thrillers like this one remain his bread and butter. More than most of his recent legal novels, "The Associate" turns on a gimmick: Grisham is well aware that the danger to young men like Kyle McAvoy is not that a Bennie will blackmail them but that big money will seduce them. Yet it's Bennie and the blackmail and the rape story that will make the book a huge success. "The Associate" is, in its way, a devastating portrait of the big-time, big-bucks legal world. The only truly admirable lawyer we meet is Kyle's father, a small-town practitioner who is beloved by his clients and hates that his son is prostituting his talents in New York. There's a touching scene when Kyle and his father go deer hunting together. For Grisham, who started out as a small-town lawyer himself, that's Eden, a paradise where decent men and women do honest work and even pursue a dream of justice. Grisham knows and loves that world; one can only hope he'll return to it more often. Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who can be reached at mondaythrillers(at symbol)aol.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "McAvoy's fight for survival against seemingly overwhelming odds is a fitting one for our times. The ending is unexpected, and it's a toss-up whether readers will be satisfied or hunger for more." USA Today Review: "[An] absorbing thriller that's a fitting follow-up to The Firm." Boston GlobeSynopsis: If you thought Mitch McDeere was in trouble in The Firm, wait
until you meet Kyle McAvoy, The Associate. Video About the Author Long before his name became synonymous with the modern legal thriller, John Grisham was working 60-70 hours a week at a small Southaven, Mississippi law practice, squeezing in time before going to the office and during courtroom recesses to work on his hobby — writing his first novel.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780385517836
- Author:
- Grisham, John
- Publisher:
- Doubleday Books
- Subject:
- Suspense
- Subject:
- Organized crime
- Subject:
- Lawyers
- Subject:
- Legal stories
- Subject:
- Suspense fiction
- Publication Date:
- January 2009
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 373
- Dimensions:
- 9.38x6.50x1.31 in. 1.37 lbs.
Other books you might like
-
-
-
-
-
-
Related Aisles
|
