The Litigators

John Grisham has the legal thriller down pat, and his audiobooks are often enhanced by the performance of narrator Dennis Boutsikaris. As he has done in other Grisham novels, Boutsikaris lends a touch of whimsy to the process that lets the listener know that everything is going to work out. He makes a good book even better. This story begins with a burned-out lawyer who jumps ship and seeks comfort in a boutique firm, only to become embroiled in a legal miasma. Worse, he is the only one who can save the day when slam-dunk litigation against a big drug company goes south. He has to put aside his courtroom na•veté and battle the big boys to save his new firm. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

October 24, 2011
Grisham's entertaining modern-day legal thriller offers a bitingly farcical look at lawyers at the bottom of the food chain. David Zinc, an associate at a Chicago mega-firm who's sick of the sweatshop he's been laboring in for five years, flees the office one morning and ends up spending all day in a bar. Soon after the bartender finally kicks him out, Zinc spots an ad on a city bus for a firm of ambulance-chasers, Finley & Figg, and resolves to join their hapless practice. Meanwhile, Wally Figg, one of Finley & Figg's two partners, thinks he's found a goldmine after learning that a client who died recently was taking an anti-cholesterol drug called Krayoxx. Zinc, who has zero litigation experience, aids Finley & Figg, who likewise lack litigation experience, in filing suit against the huge pharmaceutical company that produces Krayoxx. Grisham (The Confession) makes Zinc's personal transformation more convincing than his professional one. Some readers may feel the fairy tale ending clashes with the dark humor of the opening.