The Associate by John Grisham

I've always read a lot. In high school I read a lot of John Grisham and loved it. I read through pretty much his collection - The Client, The Firm, A Time to Kill, The Pelican Brief, The Runaway Jury. If it was written by John Grisham I read it. Then somewhere in the middle of my college experience I found other authors and hadn't picked up any John Grisham novels since then. Today I picked one up for the first time in five years, and I remembered both why I loved his writing and why I hadn't picked one up for a while.

The Associate is about a first-year associate at the world's biggest law firm that is being blackmailed by a thug to steal documents in the biggest case of the century. The first half of the book scared me being the wife of a 3rd year law student about to take the bar and about to start his first year at a big firm. However, after I got over the worry about my husband billing 2000 hours a year I started enjoying the book. It was a quick read (probably took me somewhere between 4-6 hours) and an easy read. The story was compelling and kept me reading up until about the last 50 pages. I was hoping for a lot of twists and turns in the last 50 pages, but they juts weren't there. The end of the book was exactly what I'd expected and gave me nothing new. So not my favorite John Grisham book but worth the four or so hours I spent reading it. 3 stars.