The Firm

Mitch McDeere is a gifted young man from a poor Kentucky family who finishes near the top of his class at Harvard Law and gets offers from the biggest firms in New York and Chicago. He chooses Bendini, Lambert & Locke, a small and discreet tax firm in Memphis, because it offers the most: a high salary, a low-interest mortgage, a new car and a house, and a promise of belonging to a family rather than a factory. He and his wife, Abby, settle into the good life.

Then two of the firm's lawyers die in a diving accident in the Cayman Islands, and Mitch notices how little anyone will say about them. A private investigator he hires is killed, and the FBI approaches him with a claim that the firm is a front for the Morolto crime family, laundering money through offshore companies.

The partners watch him closely and the bond he thought he had joined starts to look like a trap. Caught between a criminal organization that does not let associates leave and a government that wants him to inform, Mitch has to find a way out that keeps him, his wife and his imprisoned brother alive.

The Firm, Grisham's second novel and his breakout, was published in 1991 and made him a bestselling author. It was adapted as a 1993 film with Tom Cruise, and Grisham returned to the characters in the 2023 sequel The Exchange.