Kyle McAvoy had just finished his evening's charity work when he saw an unfamiliar, well-built man waiting by the door. "I'm FBI Agent Ginyard," the man said. "We've found a video of that incident at your frat house five years ago. You'd better meet Detective Bennie Wright."
Kyle's heart sank. He'd done his best to forget that night when Elaine Keenan had got laid by his roommates, Baxter Tate and Joey Bernardo. She had cried rape a few days later, but everyone knew she was a party girl who smoked a lot of dope and liked to sleep around, and the case had soon been dropped.
"I never so much as touched her that night," he cried as Bennie showed him the video. "You can see I had passed out on the floor."
"I know that," Detective Wright laughed. "Do you really think a Grisham hero could be a suspected rapist? But if you can't accept the possibility as a reasonable premise then we haven't got a story. And, by the way, I'm not with the police. I'm with a shadowy international organisation that has tentacles in all echelons of American life."
"OK," said Kyle. "Suppose for a minute I allow myself to be blackmailed, rather than get myself a decent lawyer who will have your video evidence against me thrown out of court in seconds. What do you want from me?"
"That's easy," Bennie replied. "When you graduate from Yale as top law student, we don't want you to take the goody-goody pro bono job you were planning on. Instead, we want you to take the $200,000 a year job with cut-throat New York firm, Scully & Pershing and do some corporate espionage."
"I'm quietly disappointed that you've taken the New York job," said Kyle's father, who ran a friendly small-town legal practice in Baltimore, "but I'm not going to mention it as we have a close relationship and I respect your choices." It killed him not to tell the truth but Kyle knew he owed it to the plot to say silent.
New associates were expected to work 33 hours a day and Kyle was getting a little bit tired by the end of his first fortnight. Still, he would do what he needed to do and it was, at least, familiar territory, as he had read Grisham's first book, The Firm, in which a new recruit to a law firm finds himself caught up in shady business.
"We want you to get assigned to the Trylon v Bartin case over the contracts for the Pentagon's B-10 Hypersonic bomber," said Bennie. "All the documents are kept in a locked room on the 733rd floor."
How could they know all that? Kyle wondered. They must have a mole at Scully & Pershing. "There's no way a junior would ever get assigned to such a high- profile case," he said.
Kyle knew his every move was being watched and that the whole of New York was bugged, but he managed to escape for a nanosecond to meet Joey. "Elaine's become a lesbian and definitely thinks it was rape," said Joey, "and Baxter is now a recovering alcoholic and wants to make amends."
"They will kill him if he does that," Kyle gasped, "as Bennie would no longer be able to blackmail me."
The phone rang. Seventeen people at Scully & Pershing had died mysteriously and Kyle was being assigned to the Trylon v Bartin case. The phone rang again. Baxter had been killed. Kyle slipped out the building and met tough-talking lawyer, Roy Benedict.
"Here's what we do," said Benedict, at least 250 pages too late. "You get the info for Bennie and I'll call in your Dad and the Feds and cut a deal with Elaine."
Kyle slipped into the office, easily outwitting all the security, and took the memory stick to the FBI. "Shit," yelled Benedict. "Bennie has escaped. Someone must have tipped him off."
"So let's get this straight," said Kyle. "We never get to find out who Bennie was or where he went, the name of the shadowy, multi-tentacular international organisation he worked for or what they wanted and who at both Scully & Pershing and the FBI tipped him off."
"Shut it," Grisham snapped. "I'm the talent round here. Just run along and do some feelgood work with your Dad before I rub you out."
The digested read, digested: Yale's finest mind. Apparently.