I recall reading and enjoying John Grisham’s THE FIRM (and the movie made from it) a long time ago. When I saw that The Exchange was a story of Mitch and Abby McDeere fifteen years after their youthful adventures with the Bendini firm, I was eager to find a copy of it. I found out that Mitch was now a partner in a major international law firm based in New York City and his wife was editing and publishing cookbooks. They had a fancy apartment overlooking the park and two sons in a selective private school. For all the world they were Mr. and Mrs. Successful in the rarified world of high-level Wall Street lawyers.
I was pleased with the couple’s success, but still feel you may
want to exchange The Exchange for some other title. It has a tired overused central plot that cannot
make the wonder world of mucho-money and international intrigue seem enticing. For the record a mysterious cabal of terrorists
kidnap a young lawyer from Mitch’s firm and demand an outrageous ransom or they
will kill their hostage. After 200 pages of private jet travel, splashy hotels,
fancy meals at Michelin starred restaurants, chauffeured black limos, and
committee meetings with stuffy partners who appear only marginally less venal
than the villains, the dough is raised and the bad guys are paid off. We never
know who they were and what they were really angling for. Maybe that’s the
point—the rot is everywhere. I remain perplexed that all that money and access
can’t manage to find out anything about a group that can seemingly track countless
highly personal details and blow up things in cities around the world without
leaving a trace. The hostage is kept in a series of hovels and caves in the remote
Libyan Sahara and yet can be miraculously delivered alive and spiffed up to the
Cayman Islands a day after the ransom is paid. The cracks in the plot are wider than the Grand
Canyon. I wish it were not so, but this is not Grisham at his best.
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