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Overview
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Once he was a well-liked, well-paid young partner in a thriving Mississippi law firm. Then Patrick Lanigan stole ninety million dollars from his own firm—and ran for his life. For four years, he evaded men who were rich and powerful, and who would stop at nothing to find him. Then, inevitably, on the edge of the Brazilian jungle, they finally tracked him down.
Now Patrick is coming home. And in the Mississippi city where it all began, an extraordinary trial is about to begin. As prosecutors circle like sharks, as Patrick’s lawyer prepares his defense, as Patrick’s lover prays for his deliverance and his former partners wait for their revenge, another story is about to emerge. Because Patrick Lanigan, the most reviled white-collar criminal of his time, knows something that no one else in the world knows. He knows the truth.
From the master of courtroom drama comes the ultimate in suspense -- The Partner, John Grisham's new spellbinding novel.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Money is essentially the principal character in Grisham's new thriller. It is a very large sum of it. $90 million to be exact, that has motivated Gulf Coast lawyer Patrick Lanigan to concoct a scheme to disappear that is even more elaborate (if less convincing) than the one in the recent The Big Picture. It is money that drove a crooked defense contractor to try to pry loose a huge sum from Washington, and got Patrick's greedy law firm involved in the first place. And it is varying sums of money that enable Patrick to bribe his way out of a collection of indictments against him a yard long including one for first-degree murder when he is eventually found in his Brazilian hideaway and brought back to the U.S. to face the music. Already, at the end of The Runaway Jury, Grisham was displaying his fascination with the techniques of moving huge sums rapidly around the world, and here it becomes a key plot device. Even when tortured by his captors, Patrick can say he doesn't know where the money is, because only his Brazilian lover, fellow lawyer Eva Miranda, really knows and no one knows where she is. To call the plot of The Partner mechanical is at least partly a compliment: it is well-oiled, intricate and works smoothly. But its cynicism is remorseless: Lanigan is hardly a hero to warm to, despite his ingenuity (he puts on a lot of weight before his disappearance, just so he can take it off later and look altogether different). He is all calculation, and when it seems, at the end, as if someone has double-crossed him too, it is difficult to muster any sympathy. In Grisham's world money rules, and it is a sign of weakness to ignore its power. Not that the author is likely to do so, anyway; every indication is that his latest will rake it in once again.Salon
John Grisham's new novel, The Partner, is an escapist novel about escape. It's apparently not enough that Grisham has become as prolific a purveyor of beach reading as America's got at the moment. Now he's instructed his readers on how to add an extra 50 weeks a year to their towel time.First, you fake your death in a fiery car crash, like his protagonist, Patrick Lanigan. Next, impersonate one of your law partners and abscond with $90 million owed to a client. Finally, fly down to Rio, change your name to Danilo and lose yourself in the midst of a bazillion Brazilians. Pick up a paperback at the airport on your way in.
But not so fast. Patrick's done all this four years ago, and none of it keeps him from getting caught by ruthless bounty hunters in the first chapter (available on AOL, if AOL's available). At this point, Patrick's girlfriend springs one of only two surprises in the whole novel, but for a legal thriller, it's a lulu: She rescues him by telling the truth. She calls the FBI, whom Patrick's been fleeing since the day he disappeared, and the G-men frighten off the goons and extradite Patrick back to Mississippi, a place Patrick despises (and Grisham loves).
Ahhh, you can almost hear Grisham sigh, home-court advantage. Goodbye nasty old Rio, hello 40 chapters of interminable legal maneuverings, as Patrick plays his victims off against the Feds to regain his freedom. Reading the middle chunk of The Partner is like being sued by a really good lawyer. Between the boilerplate descriptive paragraphs and the depositions masquerading as dialogue and the interchangeable characters -- Who's this again? Better flip back -- Grisham papers you to death.
The plot doesn't have any real holes to speak of, but it doesn't have any special wrinkles, either. (At least not until the end, which actually isn't bad.) Patrick's meant to be an enigma -- so we can wonder if he's capable of having killed the corpse that passed for him in the car wreck -- but he comes off as more of a cipher instead. Grisham's use of language isn't embarrassing, except perhaps cumulatively, when you get near the end and realize he hasn't turned a single memorable phrase. This reviewer's quotational tweezers hovered over every page, but Grisham's patented non-stick prose resists plucking.
The Partner could have been an interesting book. It's always chancy to label themes as peculiarly American -- as if one country could corner the market on individualism, say, or self-reliance -- but the idea of thwarted escape does seem to tempt us endlessly, from Huck Finn clear up through Rabbit, Run. Grisham senses this, and flirts with it a couple of times, but he's too busy filing countermotions to make much hay out of it. By the end of The Partner, we find out pretty much the same thing Patrick did during his Brazilian getaway: Escapism's no fun if you have to keep looking behind you, whether for shady characters or, in the reader's case, half-forgotten ones. March 7, 1997-- David Kipen
Kirkus Reviews
Grisham (The Client, 1993, etc.) justifies a colossal first printing of 2.8 million copies with his best-plotted novel yet, gripping the reader mightily and not letting go. Nor is there the dispersal of belief that often follows his knockout openings.Patrick Lanigan is tracked down to his hideout in Brazil, where he lives modestly near the Paraguayan border. Surely, Jack Stephano thinks, Patrick could not have spent the $90 million he ran off with four years ago. Jack has spent $3 million tracking Patrick down, and he wants that money. He wants it so much that he's blithely torturing Patrick to discover its location. The problem is that Patrick doesn't really know. He's given power of attorney to his lover, the brilliant Brazilian lawyer Eva Miranda, and she has been shuttling the money from bank to bank around the world, keeping it untraceable. When Patrick fails to call her at four in the afternoon, per usual, she skips out, as they've planned, and goes into hiding. And as planned, she phones the FBI office in Biloxi, Mississippi, and tells them that one Jack Stephano has very likely captured Patrick and is holding him in Brazil. The FBI puts pressure on Stephano to bring Patrick back to Biloxi, where the embezzlement took place and where Patrick's cremated remains were buried after his car went over an embankment. Patrick even attended his own funeral, watching through binoculars. As it turns out, the $90 million he ran off with was dirty money his law firm had helped collect in a criminal conspiracy to rob the government. Will the money be returned? Will Patrick escape trial for the murder of whoever it was that died in that accident? And what of Eva, now hiding in the States and helping Patrick orchestrate his defense?
Grisham comes up with a masterfully bittersweet end (with his title taking on a sly double edge) that may be his most satisfying ever.
From the Publisher
#1 New York Times bestseller!First time in paperback!
"One terrific book--smart, fast, stingingly satiric, and almost criminally entertaining."
--Entertainment Weekly
"An irresistible read...packed with surprises."
-- People
"Brilliant...John Grisham may well be the best American storyteller writing today."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer
A Main Selection of the Literary Guild and the Doubleday Book Club
From the Paperback edition.