The Rooster Bar – John Grisham

Grisham seldom disappoints but I began this one with doubts. His characters are three student friends at Foggy Bottom law school, suckered in to a diploma mill by the school’s glossy advertising. In their final semester they are suffocating in debt and unlikely to find jobs or even pass the bar examination. The death of a friend has them re-examining their options and deciding the other side of the law has more attractions. Those first pages lacked the author’s usual authority almost as if he had sketched the plot and handed it to a trainee for writing. In retrospect it was his depiction of student life that failed to ring true and once he has them in the courtroom authenticity kicks back in.

Although low on the scale of criminality, practising law without a license in DC is a felony and they could end up in prison. Todd and Mark soon find themselves brazenly hustling for DUI’s in the corridors of the law while Zola more nervously prowls the emergency admissions at the local hospital for personal injury victims. She has more personal worries. Her family, undocumented immigrants from Senegal, have been arrested and face deportation. The rest of the book is a typical Grisham page-turner as their new life unravels under the attention of the larger sharks in the legal pool. Trust in the Grish. Things do work out, but much further from where the protagonists or the reader expect.