McDeere returns in frenetic novel
Thirty-two years after “The Firm” launched his career as a legal novelist who churns out bestselling books that almost invariably become movies, John Grisham returns with a sequel starring Mitch McDeere.
In “The Exchange: After the Firm,” it’s 2000, and McDeere is now a highpowered partner at the world’s largest law firm, Scully & Pershing, having “established a reputation as a sort of legal SWAT team leader sent in by Scully to rescue clients in distress.” He lives a privileged life in New York’s Manhattan with his wife and two young boys.
Grisham fans will love the first pages, as McDeere travels to Memphis for the first time since the events in “The Firm” and meets with an old friend. It’s an excuse for Grisham to fill in the 15-year time gap since Mitch and his wife, Abby, fled Memphis on the run from the Chicago mob, who was hunting him for his role exposing crimes at Bendini, Lambert & Locke, but it’s inconsequential to the new story Grisham has to tell.
That narrative kicks off when Mitch is called to Rome to take the lead on a case involving a Turkish company that built a $400 million bridge to nowhere in the Libyan desert that Colonel Gaddafi (yes, it’s the year 2000, and the Libyan dictator is still alive) is now refusing to pay for. When Mitch assigns a London-based Scully associate to go on a fact-finding mission to the bridge, she is taken hostage, and this legal thriller pretty much drops the adjective and just becomes a thriller.
Mitch’s job is not to legally outsmart his colleague’s captors, but to try to make sure she’s not beheaded by terrorists by working every angle to come up with their ransom. The action skips from New York to Rome to London to Tripoli to Istanbul.
Grisham fans will devour it, but there were times when this reader wished the action would slow down a little so we could spend some time with the characters. Mitch is always on the move — in a car, on a plane, in a boardroom — conversations are clipped, and the plot pace is furious.
Grisham certainly reflects the urgency of Mitch’s mission in his writing, but some of the best parts of the book are when the story gets a chance to breathe a little. — Rob Merrill, Associated Press
Dolly Parton’s iconic look — big hair,
big heels and tight low-cut dresses covered in rhinestones or beads — is a big part of her lasting appeal, nearly as important as her vast catalogue of country ballads and bangers that made her a star.
In “Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones,” Parton takes fans on a detailed tour through her closet, filled with 450 vivid photos of decades of sparkly dresses, jumpsuits, jeans and even wigs, which she started wearing early in her career.
She chronicles how she always knew she wanted a maximalist, flashy look and stayed true to her personal style despite seemingly endless objections by her father, managers and others who always wanted her to “tone it down.”
“From early on I loved the big hair and makeup, the long nails, the high heels, the flashy clothes,” she writes. “But believe it or not, I had to fight for that look.”
Starting with replicas of Dolly’s “Coat of Many Colors,” based on her famous song about a coat her mother made her, Dolly gives a tour of how her style evolved through the decades, from the country costumes she wore as the “girl singer” on “The Porter Wagoner Show” in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the jumpsuits she wore during her rising solo career and the flashy rhinestonestudded gowns and outfits she wore making it big in Hollywood movies like “9 to 5” and “Rhinestone.”
The book is a joint effort with her niece, Rebecca Seaver, and music journalist Holly George-Warren. It includes profiles and remembrances from her favorite designers, makeup artists, stylists and others that help put together Parton’s famous look.