The exchange by John Grisham

Mitch McDeere, like all Scully and Perishing lawyers, spends 250 hours a year doing pro-bono work. Mitch is happy to do the work for disadvantaged clients, but he has had his fill of death row cases. When asked, as a favour, to do just one more, Mitch finds himself back in Memphis, where, many years ago he was responsible for blowing the whistle on a corrupt law firm and he visits one of the other lawyers whose career was destroyed. Mitch and his family had to disappear after the corrupt firm was shut down, living in Italy for some of the years. Fifteen years later, Scully and Perisher, one of the world’s largest law firms, takes on a job for an international construction company suing the Libyan government for non-payment. Mitch, now a partner, and Giovanna, daughter of one of the firm’s senior partners, travel to Libya to scope out the job as, someone is “paying by the hour, so why not have some fun” p. 76. While there, Giovanna is abducted and the rest of the story is about obtaining an astounding amount of money to give the terrorists to secure her release. The billing of this as “The much-anticipated sequel to The Firm” which was released 30 years ago, was puzzling, the only connections were the characters Mitch and his wife Abby. It seemed at the start that it might be more, but a sudden shift to the kidnap story left any connection behind. After that it is really just about Mitch travelling the world trying to persuade powerful men to help raise the ransom money, often over meals in expensive restaurants where no one has an appetite for the food. In spite of the many different security, intelligence experts and bodyguards working for the company we are repeatedly told about, both the abduction and the hostage contact were unbelievably easy. I found the whole money raising exercise boring and the many one dimensional characters forgettable. The depiction of women seemed dated, they are beautiful, emotional and carry large bags in which they rummage for the phone. The ending lacked resolution but by then I didn’t care.

Sue Speck