Published by Doubleday on October 17, 2023
Mitch McDeere is the protagonist in John Grisham’s The Firm, a novel most readers seem to like more than I do (the movie, I thought, corrected the novel’s weak ending). Mitch McDeere is back in The Exchange, another novel that suffers from a disappointing ending.
Mitch and his wife fled from Memphis to avoid a revenge killing for bringing down a corrupt law firm — the story told in The Firm — and hid in Italy for a time. When the coast seemed clear, Mitch took a position in the New York office of the nation’s largest international law firm. Now it’s 2005, fifteen years after The Firm, and Mitch is a well-paid partner who travels the world litigating various business disputes, usually in an arbitration forum.
The firm’s Italian office represents a Turkish construction company that built a billion-dollar bridge over nothing in Libya, an ego-stroke project of Ghaddafi in which the dictator lost interest after the failure of a corresponding plan to divert a river so it would flow under the bridge.
Libya still owes the construction company $400,000 and isn’t paying. The head of the Italian office brought a claim against Libya in an international arbitration forum, but that lawyer is dying of cancer. He brings in Mitch to take over the case and persuades him to assign his daughter Giovanna, a young lawyer who works in the London office, to help him.
Mitch and Giovanna travel to Libya to rack up billable hours gazing at the bridge. Giovanni is kidnapped on a field trip. The drivers and security specialists who accompanied her are beheaded or hung or otherwise executed in gruesome fashion.
Mitch is fortunate to have avoided the kidnapping/execution, but his convenient illness (doctors apparently never know why he alone got food poisoning, if that’s what it was) and his decision to send Giovanna to do his bridge gazing made little sense. I thought Grisham was setting up a deeper mystery that never materialized.
The novel begins with Mitch’s brief pro bono assignment to a death penalty appeal in Tennessee that ends when the prisoner commits suicide. I was hoping this might be a death penalty novel — that’s Grisham’s strength, in my view — but the opening quickly gives way to the story in Libya. I again thought Grisham was setting up a plot twist and the novel would circle back to Memphis. Again, I was disappointed.
Instead, the story is a fairly ordinary thriller about someone (maybe terrorists, maybe not) who kidnaps a dual citizen of the UK and Italy and threatens to kill her if a $100 million ransom isn’t paid. Mitch spends most of the novel flying here and there, trying to raise the ransom money from governments that pretend not to negotiate with terrorists but do so for the right hostage. Some of the novel’s best scenes involve Mitch’s frustration with the management committee of his law firm, which won’t risk taking out a line of credit to fund a large chunk of the ransom because that might reduce the firm’s quarterly profits.
Mitch’s wife becomes the contact point when the payoff instructions are delivered. The scenes involving Mitch’s terrified wife are tense and deftly executed.
Unfortunately, the rest of the novel feels like a half-told story. The kidnappers seem to know quite a bit about Mitch. Do they have a contact in his firm? Are they Americans seeking revenge for Mitch’s ratting out the Memphis firm? Who knows? Grisham seemed so set up several tantalizing possibilities, then leaves every question unanswered. The result is only a partially satisfying novel. I recommend The Exchange for its ability to build tension, but not for a story that feels like it should have been so much more.
RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS