BOOK REVIEW: THE PARTNER BY JOHN GRISHAM

For those who are fans of John Grisham and followed him those days, remember The Partner.Reviewing this book fills me with nostalgia, those sweet days when you had all the time to read every novel smh.I enjoin you to follow me on this trip down memory lane. Find extracts below; They watched Danilo Silva for days before they finally grabbed him. He was living alone, a quiet life on a shady street in Brazil (and i even remember the name of the street Ponta pora lol); a simple life in a modest home, certainly not one of luxury. Certainly no evidence of the fortune they thought he had stolen. He was much thinner and his face had been altered. He spoke a different language, and spoke it very well.But Danilo had a past with many chapters. Four years earlier he had been Patrick Lanigan, a young partner in a prominent Biloxi law firm. He had a pretty wife, a new daughter, and a bright future. Then one cold winter night Patrick was trapped in a burning car and died a horrible death. When he was buried his casket held nothing more than his ashes.From a short distance away, Patrick watched his own burial. Then he fled. Six weeks later, a fortune was stolen from his ex-law firm's offshore account. And Patrick fled some more.But they found him. John Grisham's character in this book Danilo a pseudonym for Patrick Lanigan who joined a law practice as a junior partner but was relegated to the background when a deal was being hatched with the help of a Senator in Washington to fraudulently apply the Whistle blowers act and false claims law ( applicable to contractors who fraudulently inflate cost) against a US Defence contractor.Patrick secretly learns of the deal and steals hundreds of millions of dollars,fakes his death and moves to South America, but four years later he is caught. Then, the beginning of the book starts off. He falls in love with a beautiful lawyer Eva Mirinda specialising in transfer of money across the globe and entrusts her with the money. However the ending of this story is actually unpredictable as John Grisham seemed tired of "Guy and Girl living happily ever after in the Cayman Islands".In a radical change of events, the last chapter of this book becomes devastating; Patrick is betrayed by his lover who realizes she doesn't need him being the custodian of all that money. It actually hit me very hard when a very humble girl uninterested in material belongings enters a high end store in London,makes purchases of Prada and Gucci bags thinking to herself "i can afford it". Patrick surmounts all the legal hurdles and makes a deal which set him free and leaves him with a chunk representing the interest of the money stolen- in his lover's custody. I believe Grisham should not have ended the story leaving a bitter taste in my mouth. The plot works but leaves the reader going back several pages to be sure that actually happened. I recommend.