By: John Grisham
The Exchange is a sequel to the 1991 novel that launched the career of John Grisham, The Firm. As someone who showed up at Ole Miss in Oxford, MS in 1996 at the height of his popularity, I have read and loved most of the Grisham novels. I have been to signings at Square Books and driven by his house, so maybe I expected too much. This one was certainly not worth the read. Just stick to The Firm and let that be the end for you.
There are a lot of spoilers coming so don’t continue if you don’t want to know.
We find Mitch McDeere happily practicing law again in Manhattan and living a happy life with his wife and two kids. Suddenly, he finds himself in the middle of terrorist plot, with a kidnapped colleague and his wife named as the official negotiator. There is a lot of bloody, filmed killing in this one and that is really not my thing, so that made it hard to get through. But, there was a deadline given by the terrorists who want hundreds of millions of dollars, so I stayed in it to see what would happen. Shouldn’t have. We never find out who the terrorists are or what they wanted and it is totally unbelievable that they would have let the hostage go in the way they did.
While The Exchange had the Grisham signature of a fast pace and high stakes, this one seemed far fetched, gruesome and just not worth it.
Thank you to NetGalley for the free ARC in exchange for this review.
