Product Description

When Mitchell McDeere qualified third in his class at Harvard, offers poured in from every law firm in America. The firm he chose was small, but-well respected. They were prepared to match, and then exceed Mitch's wildest dreams: eighty thousand a year, a BMW and a low-interest mortgage. Now the house, the car and the job are his. Then the nightmares begin: the secret files, the bugs in the new bedroom, the mysterious deaths of colleagues, and the millions of dollars of mob money pouring through the office into the Cayman Islands, dollars that the FBI would do anything to trace. Now Mitch is in the place where dreams end and nightmares begin...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58835 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Review
His car and bedroom bugged, his every movement logged until he is irrevocably locked into the system and corrupted, a hotshot young Harvard graduate gathers indictable data on his Mafia-owned legal firm for the FBI. A high tension climax, their money and his life. (Kirkus UK)

Terrifically exciting and likable first novel about tax lawyers and the Mafia, and a predictable success already sold to the movies, etc. Grisham does not cut as deep or furnish the occasional shining paragraph that Scott Turow does, but he writes a stripped, cliche-free page that grips and propels. Mitchell McDeere, married and tops in his class at Harvard, has great offers from several firms and is hungry for success. When Bendini, Lambert & Locke of Memphis snows him with money, a new BMW, a low-interest mortgage financed by the company, a huge clothing allowance and other incredible perks, (including early retirement as a multimillionaire), he seems to have landed in fairyland. Nothing is too much for the one new man a year the firm takes on. All that's required from him in a 90-hour week for several years and a fast hand at billing clients. Most of the firm's clients, seemingly all wealthy and ready to be billed unlimitedly, are content not to question the firm's methods at relieving their tax strain. For a while all looks legal. Then McDeere learns of the heavy mortality rate among the firm's lawyers: no one ever quits Bendini, Lambert & Locke. They die. It turns out that while the firm has many clients with clean hands, it nonetheless was set up by the Mafia as a pumphouse for siphoning drug dollars and other untaxed cash into phony corporations set up in the Cayman Islands. In fact, the firm's lavish Lear jet regularly hauls tons of US legal tender down to the islands with their hundreds of tax-haven banks and secret numbered accounts. Then the FBI chooses McDeere to be its chief informant and offers him its Witness Protection Program; otherwise, McDeere will be swept up in the forthcoming crackdown on the firm. Although the firm knows McDeere is a spy and sets him up for assassination, he is smarter than even the reader knows and fights back against both the firm and the FBI. Hallucinatory entertainment. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
When Mitchell McDeere qualified third in his class at Harvard, offers poured in from every law firm in America. The firm he chose was small, but-well respected. They were prepared to match, and then exceed Mitch's wildest dreams: eighty thousand a year, a BMW and a low-interest mortgage. Now the house, the car and the job are his. Then the nightmares begin: the secret files, the bugs in the new bedroom, the mysterious deaths of colleagues, and the millions of dollars of mob money pouring through the office into the Cayman Islands, dollars that the FBI would do anything to trace. Now Mitch is in the place where dreams end and nightmares begin...

From the Publisher
Grisham's bestselling backlist reissued with fantastic new covers

Customer Reviews

Beware of Offers You Cannot Refuse

The Firm launched John Grisham to superstar status as the world's favorite debunker of the legal profession. The Firm perfectly casts the way that high-potential law students are wined, dined, and bribed into taking sweat shop jobs that ruin their lives. But like all good novels, that's just the beginning of the story. How does a small-to-medium-sized Memphis firm outbid the Wall Street boys? Therein lies a good tale.

The Firm is appealing because it takes you inside the world of exclusive, top-drawer law firms and reveals the temptations that lie there awaiting the unsuspecting young lawyer. John Grisham makes much of the detail highly accurate while also taking you on a fantasy trip that no one has taken before. The scope of his imagination about "what if" a law firm yielded to temptation is breathtaking. I could have daydreamed for 400 years and never come up with a tale like this one.

Unlike most thrillers, this one had me turning pages eagerly right up to the last page. It was truly an exciting experience for this Harvard Law School graduate.

Great
This is a great book, fantastic to read and simply unputdownable. This was my first Grisham book and I will be reading more now, I simply cannot say how great this book is and the excitment is for all.

Recruited by the Mob and the FBI
Recruited by the Mob and the FBI, such is the nature of Grisham's hero. Being a bright lad he trusts neither and outwits both. One again Grisham has written well. He keeps the reader gripped. I found the build up concerning the nature of the Firm to be really menacing. They are almost as diabolical as in Devil's Advocate.