Book #46: The Common Lawyer by Mark Giminez
Number of pages: 466
This is a book I picked up after enjoying Mark Giminez's The Colour of Law several years ago.
This book opens with its central character, Andy Prescott, having a mountain biking accident; it has very little to do with the main plot, but this (and the chapters immediately afterward) give us a good insight into what Andy is like, mentioning how he is desperate to find a girlfriend and how his father is dying.
Andy is also a young lawyer, and he unexpectedly gets a job offer from a billionaire, Russell Reeves, who has an unusual request, related to his son, who is dying from a form of cancer that was passed on genetically.
At the same time, the book introduces some other plotlines, involving a mysterious group committing a murder, and also the mysterious Patient X, who the group are trying to find out the identity of. Both eventually become relevant to the plot, and it all makes sense, although Patient X also introduces science fiction elements into the story. All we are told initially is that she has a "gift" that the world should be told about.
The plot then becomes mainly a story about Andy visiting all of Russell's previous sexual partners (17 in total), all of whom seem to have had children that he has fathered (many are also sick), until the plot focuses on one of the women, and Russell's attempts to prove that he fathered her daughter, and that the girl has the same condition as his son.
I didn't enjoy this book quite as much as The Colour of Law; I noticed it had an odd tendency to introuduce new characters and not explain who they were until several chapters later, and the narrative seemed very slow-moving and even repetitive at times (sometimes, the same information is given more than once just because it is being explained to different characters).
However, the book did throw in a few plot twists and misleads, so that I was never really sure where things were going; some were guessable, others weren't. Near the end, it really does look like the plot is about to get very bleak.
It's worth reading, as it's quite an easy book, and I eventually found myself liking the main character.
Next book: Abide (Warren W. Wiersbe)