Nothing grips like Grisham!
THE STREET LAWYER
BOOK SYNOPSIS
Michael was in a hurry. He was scrambling up the ladder at Drake & Sweeney, a giant D.C. firm with 800 lawyers. The money was good and getting better; a partnership was three years away. He was a rising star, with no time to waste, no time to stop, no time to toss a few coins into the cups of panhandlers, no time to walk around them on the sidewalk. No time for a conscience. But a violent encounter with a homeless man stopped him cold. Michael survived; his assailant did not. Who was this homeless man? Michael did some digging and learned that he was a mentally ill veteran who'd been in and out of shelters for twenty years. Then Michael dug a little deeper, and found a dirty secret, and the secret involved Drake & Sweeney. The fast track derailed; the ladder collapsed. Michael bolted from the firm, and took a top secret file with him. He landed in the streets, a poverty lawyer, a street lawyer, an advocate for the homeless. And a thief.
EXTRACT
The man with the rubber boots stepped into the elevator behind me, but I didn't see him at first. I smelled him though, the pungent odour of smoke and cheap wine and life on the street without soap. We were alone as we moved upward, and when I finally glanced over I saw the boots, black and dirty and much too large. A frayed and tattered trench coat fell to his knees. Under it, layers of foul clothing bunched around his midsection, so that he appeared stocky, almost fat. But it wasn't from being well fed; in the wintertime in D.C., the street people wear everything they own, or so it seems.
He was black and aging, his beard and hair were half-grey and hadn't been washed or cut in years. He looked straight ahead through thick sunglasses, thoroughly ignoring me, and making me wonder for a second why, exactly, I was inspecting him.
He didn't belong. It was not his building, not his elevator, not a place he could afford. The lawyers on all eight floors worked for my firm at hourly rates that still seemed obscene to me, even after seven years.
Just another street bum in from the cold. Happened all the time in downtown Washington. But we had security guards to deal with the riffraff.
Paperback: 368 pages
RRP: £6.99
ISBN: 9780099244929
To buy the audiobook, click here.
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