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The Rooster Bar by John Grisham

The Rooster Bar

“[A] buoyant, mischievous thriller . . . Grisham writes in such an inventive spirit. . . . A treat.”

—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

About the Book

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • John Grisham’s newest legal thriller takes you inside a law firm that’s on shaky ground.

Mark, Todd, and Zola came to law school to change the world, to make it a better place. But now, as third-year students, these close friends realize they have been duped. They all borrowed heavily to attend a third-tier, for-profit law school so mediocre that its graduates rarely pass the bar exam, let alone get good jobs. And when they learn that their school is one of a chain owned by a shady New York hedge-fund operator who also happens to own a bank specializing in student loans, the three know they have been caught up in The Great Law School Scam.

But maybe there's a way out. Maybe there’s a way to escape their crushing debt, expose the bank and the scam, and make a few bucks in the process. But to do so, they would first have to quit school. And leaving law school a few short months before graduation would be completely crazy, right?  Well, yes and no ...

Pull up a stool, grab a cold one, and get ready to spend some time at The Rooster Bar.

Read an Excerpt

1

The end of the year brought the usual holiday festivities, though around the Frazier house there was little to cheer. Mrs. Frazier went through the motions of decorating a small tree and wrapping a few cheap gifts and baking cookies no one really wanted, and, as always, she kept The Nutcracker running nonstop on the stereo as she gamely hummed along in the kitchen as though the season was merry.

Things were anything but merry. Mr. Frazier had moved out three years earlier, and he wasn’t missed as much as he was despised. In no time, he had moved in with his young secretary, who, as things developed, was already pregnant. Mrs. Frazier, jilted, humiliated, broke, and depressed, was still struggling.

Louie, her younger son, was under house arrest, sort of free on bail, and facing a rough year ahead with the drug charges and all. He made no effort to buy his mom anything in the way of a gift. His excuse was that he couldn’t leave the house because of the court-ordered monitor attached to his ankle. But even without it, no one expected Louie to go to the trouble of buying gifts. The year before and the year before that...

Excerpted from The Rooster Bar by John Grisham. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Praise

“[A] buoyant, mischievous thriller . . . Grisham writes in such an inventive spirit. . . . A treat.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
 
“Satisfying . . . Grisham [is] at his best when he brings his sardonic sense of humor to the sometimes questionable ethics of law and banking.”—USA Today
 
“[A] smartly told tale . . . gratifying and all-too-real.”—The Washington Post

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