Review: THE INSIDER (Berkley 2010)Author: Reece Hirsch
San Francisco lawyer Will Connelly's day gets off to a rough start when a colleague at his high-toned law firm takes a deadly tumble (right past his window, no less) off the roof of their office building. Oddly, the colleague had tried to phone Will twice that morning and even more oddly Will's card key for entering the building was switched with the dead colleague's. Based on this highly circumstantial evidence, the San Francisco police consider Will a suspect.
While all is not doom and gloom for our hero (who later that day finds out he is being offered a partnership with the firm), things take a turn for the even-worse when Will decides to celebrate his new status by going to a pick-up joint for the express purpose of picking someone up. He picks up the wrong girl and ends up blundering his way in between a rock and a hard place. As an attorney who handles mergers and acquisitions, he has (in the wake of the colleague's death) just been assigned a career-making case: handling the acquisition of Jupiter Software, the world leader in encryption software. The ill-advised pick-up leads to an unhappy brush with two Russian mobster wannabes. They threaten (and inflict) physical harm and promise to do worse, unless Will plays along and gives them insider trading information.
So now Will is facing scrutiny from the San Francisco police, threats from would-be Russian mobsters, and the choice between either pissing them off royally by going to the authorities or violating law and legal ethics by complying with their wishes. Not cool. Along with various authorities with whom Will could run afoul, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice and the California Bar, it appears Jupiter has ties with the National Security Agency. Are we having fun yet?
THE INSIDER is, indeed, an engaging and ambitious debut novel. Author Reece Hirsch does a superb job of teasing out a complex and fast-paced plot from this initial set-up. As a practicing attorney, Hirsch also does a masterful job of informing readers about the legal niceties of handling corporate transactions without bogging them down in excess detail and jargon. As the story progresses, the stakes get raised considerably and Will is put through his paces and then some. The question that kept me turning the pages was "How the hell is he going to get out from under all this?" The resolution is elegant (even if one must suspend disbelief on a key plot element in its execution) and does a nice job of tying up all the threads. And a final hurdle to be overcome adds emotional resonance to the story, as well as a slam-bang ending.
One of the things that puzzled me was Will's lack of willingness from the first to simply go to the SEC, DOJ and whoever else and tell them, "Hey, a couple of would-be Russian Mafiya types are blackmailing me. A little help here, please?" To understand why he wouldn't, consider Will's character when the story begins. He is, to put it bluntly, naive, ambitious, concerned with maintaining his status at a high muckety-muck law firm and, though essentially likable, suffering a teeny bit from the kind of hubris and I'm-too-special-for-words attitude I've seen on (thankfully rare) occasion in legal practitioners. He has, as I would put it, "drunk the Kool-Aid." (I speak as one who has observed this directly and from the inside of the legal profession.) He is also a person very concerned with keeping up appearances, and maintaining a well planned and orderly life.
Unlike many thrillers, this book is not just about Will's external struggle with evil forces and the apparent ruination of his legal career. As Will grapples with his problems, enlisting the aid of a fellow student from his law school class who took another, ostensibly less exalted, career path (and, ultimately, became a solo general practitioner), he learns that being a great lawyer isn't about being on law review and making partner at a high muckety-muck firm. And in learning these lessons, Will not only overcomes his problems, but reconnects with his own passions and realizes that the word "lawyer" doesn't have to be synonymous with "type A, buttoned down over-achiever."
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