Krishna
We have reviewed a lot of John Grisham’s books earlier, The Pelican Brief and The King of Torts for just two examples.
There is a man who was evading detection. He ran away with quite a lot of money that did not belong to him and simply vanished. Ultimately a very professional ‘location service’ was hired to find that man and recover the money stolen. They search for many years and finally, after many false starts find him. They take him, after an anxious moment where he just disappeared for two days, and then fingerprint him to determine that he is indeed their quarry. He was going by a false name but his real name was Patrick.
Meanwhile, a partner, Eva, far away in USA realizes that he is gone, just based on the fact that he did not contact periodically and on the fact that he was unreachable. She operates the ‘code’ by calling the FBI to tell them that a private gang has Patrick in custody. FBI figures out that it is a private agency and which one.
The owner of the agency, Stephano, is surprised when the Feds come knocking on his door threatening to cause him trouble if he did not hand over Patrick immediately. He is stunned at the speed of the discovery. He complies and FBI says that he will be prosecuted for torture. Patrick was nearly at the death’s door when he was delivered. By then he had given the name of the girl who was his partner. She of course, had fled by then.
She finally sees the TV and realizes that Patrick has been taken custody by the FBI.
Patrick meanwhile sends her to a childhood friend of his, a lawyer called Sandy, to represent him and he agrees, even though he suspects that the case is hopeless.
Patrick manages to get himself into a hospital instead of jail, citing his injuries while Patrick’s lawyer Sandy (who was his classmate ages ago) manages to cause a huge stir when he announces to the press that he is suing the FBI for torture.
The man in charge of the previous torture is still planning to find and torture the girl lawyer (who is Patrick’s girlfriend Eva) and recover the money Patrick stole.
Now we go into the back story. One of th lawyers was working for a company which habitually overcharged government contracts and made money. This partner, Aricio was one such man. He did not want to be in a small town like Biloxi as he had ambitions of the top job in the large company. However, he was forced to look after the defense contract from the government.
Aricio also knew that if the fraud was ever found out, it is the people closest to the danger zone that were fired before the company made a deal to pay back and promise that it would never happen again. When his deal starts to smell and an investigation was imminent, he turns whistleblower going after the 15% that was given to those who helped blow it apart and that was the nineteen billion dollars that Patrick, a young lawyer in the company through which Aricio was trying to redeem himself, disappeared with.
Meanwhile Patrick provides evidence to his lawyer that Trudy was carrying on with Lance before, during and after his marriage and also that the daughter was not his. He had collected evidence through detectives and had a DNA sample analyzed.
He asks Sandy to meet Trudy’s lawyer and present the evidence: his terms of not publicizing it to the media is that she withdraw all claims on him and accept a divorce with no compensation. He does not need visiting rights to his daughter, love her as he does.
The reaction of the lawyer and, when he carries the news to Trudy and Lance, is terrific to read. He provides evidence of their affair throughout her marriage to Patrick as well as DNA evidence that the daughter is not his but Lance’s. Sandy’s terms to Trudy is to agree to a divorce with no claim at all on any of his property or the whole evidence will be presented to the media and the divorce court.
Patrick meets a judge, Karl, on a non business visit and explains how he planned the heist. He actually learnt that his partners were planning the swindle and – by tapping their rooms – he found that they were planning to fire him so that he does not get any part of the loot. He explains how he planned the car crash – does not explain how the corpse came to be in the car but everything else. How he wanted the crash to look real and in engineering it, nearly twisted his shoulder and could have even died if it had gone wrong.
In the meanwhile, Evaès father is kidnapped and she almost decides to come home. Patrick stops her and sends Sandy to convince her to stay. He also gives evidence to Sandy to tip off the Feds that Stephano, the private investigator hired to find him in the first place by his lawyer friends, is still trying to recover the money.
Meanwhile, Eva feels she is followed by a guy and after verifying, runs. Unfortunately, she takes a flight which was already notified to look for a lady of her description by FBI. She is caught and transferred to a cell.
Patrick then does several amazing things, managing to get the feds drop their charges in lieu of helping them catch the crooked lawyers. Twist number one : the whole deal that made the money he stole was crooked and designed to screw the US of A. He then proves that the body in the car was not that of the boy in his cabin but was that of a man called Clovis, who he had helped and then later used his body to place in the car.
The astonishment and defeat of all his opponents, and the near perfect planning ahead of time by Patrick are astounding!
He then throws a bombshell to Sandy about who gave the clue that had him get caught.
And finally the biggest bombshell of all when he was released and goes a fully free man to the place to spend the rest of his life in peace.
Brilliant.
8/10
— Krishna