Tom Mayer: The firm goes international in John Grisham's new thriller, 'The Exchange'

Oct. 17—More than three decades after an up-and-coming author published his second legal thriller, "The Exchange" (Doubleday, 352 pages) picks up the threads left dangling when a young attorney, Mitch McDeere, and his wife, Abby, not only escaped a mob-controlled law firm, but helped to dismantle the shadow operation and sentence its top executives to long prison terms.

In 1991, John Grisham's "The Firm" was inventive and rich in suspense — a moral thriller for its time. His 2023 sequel promises as much.

Not aging in real time — the novel is set in 2000, 15 years after the McDeere's left Memphis — Mitch is now 41 and a partner at the New York office of Scully & Pershing, "the largest firm in the world," employing thousands of attorneys across the globe. In his current role, he's carved out a niche as "sort of legal SWAT team leader (rescuing) clients in distress."

Abby, working at a prestigious niche publishing house, has built a reputation editing gourmet cookbooks, interacting with international authors who often use the McDeere's New York apartment — and their children — as a test kitchen for epicurean concoctions. Not that Abby and Mitch are out of touch with their roots — their twin boys would often rather have pizza than Foie gras.

So, it's not unusual when Mitch is tasked with helping an Italian partner at Scully argue a lawsuit on behalf of a Turkish company. The construction outfit is owed hundreds of millions of dollars by the Libyan government for building a "billion-dollar bridge over a dried-up river in the middle of the desert."

Mitch agrees to take the partner's daughter, Giovanna, onto his legal team, and the two Scully lawyers trek to Libya on an inspection tour of the Muammar Gaddafi-driven pipe dream. When Mitch develops food poisoning, Giovanni continues on without him, but is soon kidnapped by unnamed terrorists.

As well-informed as they are well-prepared, the kidnappers contact Abby in New York and she quickly becomes the sole means of communication for negotiations that involve an enormous sum of money — extortionate, but not beyond the means of the law firm if its partners would agree to mortgage their near-term financial largesse.

As Grisham has evolved as a novelist, so have the moral dilemmas he presents. Here, the dichotomy between the livelihoods of Scully's ultra-wealthy partners and the plea Mitch makes to fund the ransom demand tells us much about the author's thinking on the lure of corporate greed.

All of this makes "The Exchange" vintage Grisham even as he crafts a novel for today. A worthy successor to "The Firm," here he displays a talent for sequels — which is timely.

Just days before the Oct. 17 publication of his new novel, Doubleday announced the release of Grisham's next, next book. That story promises to take us back to Camino Island where bookstore owner Bruce Cable will be reunited with Mercer Mann in "Camino Ghosts" in late-spring 2024.