The Associate

I suppose when you have the record John Grisham has achieved you can write whatever you like and your publishers will think it will sell enough before customers find out that it is the worst this author has written.By the end of the second disk you are so annoyed with this "hero" and the other uninteresting characters that you wonder if it is worth continuing .But you plug on hoping it gets better .By the time you get to the pathetic ending you realise the author was also bored to death.
If one bought any other article as bad as this you could go and get your money back.

Good potential. When not predictable, it's implausible. Next time Grisham writes a book, I'm going to assume it's bad until I hear otherwise. At least there weren't lengthy descriptions of Italian food.

Like new at a fraction the cost!

loved it

Have you all read [[ASIN:0440245923 The Firm: A Novel]]? Oh, Good...then you know the plot more or less. There are just a few changes here...nothing too big.
Our hero this time around is Kyle McAvoy. He just graduated from Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. Ambitious but socially conscious, he first intends to spend three years doing public service (helping immigrants or migrant workers in the mid-Atlantic region, I think) and he'll then apply to a big, prestigious law firm who would surely take such a promising young lad...you don't see anything derailing that plan, right?
Well, here's the derailment. A mysterious man named Bennie Wright comes along with a couple of thugs who pretend to be FBI agents (sure glad they take that federal offense so lightly.) Bennie has a videotape that very strongly suggests that, during a party that Kyle hosted in his undergraduate days, two friends of his had raped a girl who was drunk and passed out. Nothing had been proven back then but Kyle knows that the secret would surely come out if that tape is released...though, does anyone even have videotapes or VCRs anymore?
In exchange for the matter to remain buried, Bennie wants Kyle to skip his public service plans and get a job at Scully & Pershing, a law firm in New York City said to be the largest and most prestigious in the world. There, he is to retrieve files about a lawsuit regarding a government contract and pass them back to his new best friend. Kyle goes along with this plan but eventually tries to find a way out.
Okay, this book is a pale imitation of The Firm. Kyle is bland, we're constantly being reminded that Bennie Wright is evil, and there's surveillance and conspiracies. I'm not a big fan of love interests in these kinds of stories, but the girl kind of worked here. She and Kyle had some nice chemistry, but that was ultimately botched as well.
Apart from constantly being reminded that he's a "rat" and evil and all that, we know nothing about Bennie Wright. That'd be okay if he was actually an interesting villain. But he's not. He's bland and his big plan is a blackmail/extortion scheme which we've heard of a hundred times before. As far as whoever's side he's on, we barely even get any speculation on that except for opening the possibilities that someone high up in the government is pulling his strings...no one ever really considers that it's someone on the opposing side of the lawsuit, which would also be a weak plot element. And the guy's ultimate fate is one of the biggest cop outs that John Grisham ever wrote. The only salvation for the character would be for him to appear in another book and have him get a satisfactory ending to his so-called story arc.
Because the author's John Grisham, you can still expect a page-turner. The story had a few decent elements to it, but they're all ones we've seen before. This is Grisham's least original idea and my least favorite books of his. The fact that the audio book is unabridged ultimately doesn't make a difference for me. If you want, go read it and create your own opinion. If you must, go ahead and add it to your collection. Enjoy.