The Partner

The Partner is a legal thriller by the American writer John Grisham, published in 1997. It was his eighth novel, and it opens with a man who has been hunted around the world finally being caught.

Patrick Lanigan was a junior partner in a law firm based in Biloxi, Mississippi. He discovered that the firm's client, the shipbuilding magnate Benny Aricia, was defrauding the government through inflated and falsified contracts for the construction of navy vessels, and that the senior partners were taking a share of the proceeds. They had not included him in the scheme.

Lanigan made a plan of his own. He faked his death, took ninety million dollars out of the offshore accounts where the firm had hidden the money, and started again in South America with a new name, a new face and a woman he loved. Four years later Aricia's men find him in a small town in Brazil near the border with Paraguay, and the novel turns into a fight over who is entitled to what.