The Firm
At the top of his class at Harvard Law, he had his choice of the best in America. He made a deadly mistake. When Mitch McDeere signed on with Bendini, Lambert & Locke of Memphis, he thought he and his beautiful wife, Abby, were on their way. The firm leased him a BMW, paid off his school loans, arranged a mortgage and hired him a decorator. Mitch McDeere should have remembered what his brother Ray -- doing fifteen years in a Tennessee jail -- already knew. You never get nothing for nothing. Now the FBI has the lowdown on Mitch's firm and needs his help. Mitch is caught between a rock and a hard place, with no choice -- if he wants to live.
Hard to believe, but there was a time when the word "lawyer" wasn't synonymous with "criminal," and the idea of a law firm controlled by the Mafia was an outlandish proposition. This intelligent, ensnaring story came out of nowhere--Oxford, Mississippi, where Grisham was a small-town lawyer--and quickly catapulted to the top of the bestseller list, with good reason. Mitch McDeere, the appealing hero, is a poor kid whose only assets are a first-class mind, a Harvard law degree, and a beautiful, loving wife. When a Memphis law firm makes him an offer he really can't refuse, he trades his old Nissan for a new BMW, his cramped apartment for a house in the best part of town, and puts in long hours finding tax shelters for Texans who'd rather pay a lawyer than the IRS. Nothing criminal about that. He'd be set for life, if only associates at the firm didn't have a funny habit of dying, and the FBI wasn't trying to get Mitch to turn his colleagues in. The tempo and pacing are brilliant, the thrills keep coming, and the finish has a wonderful ironic flourish. It's not hard to see why Grisham changed the genre permanently with this one, and few of his colleagues in a very crowded field come close to equaling him. --Jane Adams
The Firm Accessories
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The Firm Reviews
The story begins when Mitch Mcdeere finally finishes his schooling at Harvard Law. I don't want to ruin the story for anyone, but let me tell you that it will suck you in and leave you breathless. Mitch begins to see the darker side of the firm after he gets there. He receives job offers from all big law firms on Wall Street, but he also receives a different offer from a firm in Memphis.
Do yourself a favor and go buy the book today and start reading. It truly is a must read even if you know nothing about law. They offer him a huge salary, a new BMW, and no more school loan expenses, it seems too good to be true, unfortunately it is.
No one has ever left the firm, and some of the lawyers tend to die mysterious deaths. This was my first Grisham book and it certainly did not disappoint.
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. 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. It was truly an exciting experience for this Harvard Law School graduate.
Therein lies a good tale. I could have daydreamed for 400 years and never come up with a tale like this one. The Firm launched John Grisham to superstar status as the world's favorite debunker of the legal profession. The scope of his imagination about "what if" a law firm yielded to temptation is breathtaking. John Grisham makes much of the detail highly accurate while also taking you on a fantasy trip that no one has taken before. Unlike most thrillers, this one had me turning pages eagerly right up to the last page.
Reader's range of character voices: 2 stars. Also, he doesn't do much with female voices other than soften his voice slightly. Pros: I have read the book and listened to the audiobook, both versions are unputdownable. Quality of narration: 4 stars.
The Firm. Story: 4 out of 5 stars. Abridged: No. His delivery is clearly enunciated and pitched so you don't have to keep changing volume to hear what's being said.
Cons: Brick does an excellent job on New York and Long Island accents (check out his reading of Nelson DeMille's John Corey series), but "The Firm" takes place in the Deep South and his southern accents are weak to non-existent. As for the audiobook narration, Scott Brick's voice is warm and listenable.
The escape of Mitch from the firm was somewhat suspicious and his ability to get access to all of the files is somewhat hard to believe but still made for a good read. After being approached by the FBI I was always curious as to whether he would follow the same path as the former associates who were recently killed or take the greedy path and stick with the money. The long nights and hard work seem to have brought Mitch McDeere exactly what he wanted, a warm climate, a BMW, and a mortgage to a house for himself and his wife. The ability of Grisham to tell the story from many points of view and keep the most important details hidden till the very end was key to keeping interest in the novel. He soon realized after two deaths his first day on the job that the firm was not a safe place to be. From the start of the novel I could not put it down and was always enticed by the next twist or turn that would come. This thrilling and exhilarating Grisham novel starts out and explains the normal occurrences of a lawyer fresh out of law school.
I found it fascinating. This is one of the few books that had me waking up in the middle of the night to read another chapter.
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