The Associate

The Associate is a legal thriller by the American writer John Grisham, published in 2009 and his twenty-first novel.

Kyle McAvoy comes out of Yale Law School with a plan: three years of public service first, then an application to one of the prestigious firms. Two men who present themselves as federal agents interrupt it, and the man they hand him on to, Bennie Wright, has something more persuasive than a threat. Kyle's secret is a videotape made at a party in his undergraduate apartment five years earlier, and Wright's terms are simple: take a job at a particular New York law firm and pass on what he finds there. Kyle cannot test how far the blackmail reaches or who else is involved, and the work he is asked to do puts him in the middle of a case whose papers are worth more than his career.

Grisham had written about lawyers at the top of the profession before, and this novel turns on a young one with no leverage at all, watched by people who know what he did when he was twenty. The firm is familiar to Kyle in every detail except the reason he is there, and the book follows what a person does with a secret he cannot disprove.