read by Ari Fliakos
Grisham is a long-time favourite of AudioBooksReview. He has the enviable talent of whetting the appetite, getting the juices flowing and then delivering something arguably unsubstantial but generally satisfying to consume and mull over in retrospect.
Characterisation might be a little thin (two of
the protagonists of The Rooster Bar,
Mark Frazier and Todd Lucero, are at times indistinguishable: something perhaps
substantiated by the bedmate they share, prosecutor Hadley Caviness), but the
story carries you along and, well, you just have to know how it all ends up. So
many books fail in their initial hooks and there are a fair few that, despite
rewinding and restarting, your reviewer has never heard further than the
opening twenty minutes.
The Rooster Bar
fulfils the Grisham promise.
Inspired by an article in American magazine The Atlantic, Grisham’s new book
examines the for-profit legal education industry. These new establishments,
deemed educational and named ‘universities’, are part of a criminal cohort now
plying their cynical trade in England too. In England, annual fees of just
under £10,000 are charged by former polytechnics and greedy new colleges, just
like older varsities, but which cannot be said to offer anything like a
comparable education or qualification.
In The Rooster Bar,
Mark Frazier, Todd Lucero and Zola Maal are third-year law students, deep in
debt, facing their final term at Foggy Bottom Law School in Washington, DC: a prestigious
location, but more dedicated to profit than to learning. Friend and classmate
Gordy Tanner has convinced himself of the educational conspiracy whereby law
schools admit unqualified students so as to profit from their student loans. Moreover,
Foggy Bottom’s owner, a Wall Street lawyer, also has links to one of the banks that
specialises in lending to students. Gordy’s discovery tips the balance of his
frayed nerves and he jumps off the Arlington Memorial Bridge.
The students, routinely harassed by the banks lending them
the money to study, and troubled by their friend’s suicide, eventually decide that
enough is enough. They drop out of classes, assume new identities and, with the
Rooster Bar as their business address, trawl the lower courts, ambulance
chasing, picking up desperate clients for traffic violations and the like so
they can practise law without a licence –
a felony, they reassure themselves, rather than a misdemeanour, but
lucrative work and they are learning law on the job, so to speak.
Of course, it all goes right until it doesn’t, with a few
unhappy clients and their own creditors starting to close in. A class action,
with thousands of complainants who apparently don’t need to be verified to
share in a multi-million dollar out-of-court settlement, is the climactic
clincher: debts wiped out, money in the bank (lots), early retirement in a warm
place with new identities. What could go wrong?
Grisham’s simple morality tales of Davids and Goliaths
rarely fail to satisfy. The protagonists might be a trifle two dimensional, but
the yarns are entertaining yarns and feed the imagination with plenty of the
magical ‘what ifs’ of popular fiction.
Can’t wait for next year’s.
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