The Rooster Bar

The Big Scam

John Grisham seemed to have taken a beach holiday with the pleasantly breezy Camino Island, and, with his new book The Rooster Bar, is back to the kind of taut legal thriller his fans expect of him.

The general assumption is that the law is not such a big ass in the US, that justice may be occasionally denied but it is seldom delayed. The Rooster Bar exposes not just how scam-ridden the legal system is, but how rampant corruption is in banking and education sectors.

The three protagonists of this novel—Mark, Todd and Zola—discover just a semester before they are to complete their law course in a college called Foggy Bottom (how could a law school with a name like that even exist?) that they were victims of a huge education scam.

They were taken in by the career success fairy tales on the Foggy Bottom brochures, and took loans to enroll. They did not stop to think why they got the big loans so easily or how mediocre students like them were even admitted. They realized that the well-paid jobs they were promised did not exist, they could not possibly pass the bar exam, and that they had no means to repay the loans. One of their friends, the bipolar Gordon, digs into the workings of Foggy Bottom and its elusive owner Hinds Rackley and before committing suicide, tells them how the system has taken them for a ride. Rackley hides behind several shell companies and rakes in billions from hopeful, trusting and desperate students.

All three are in a financial soup with their massive debt; things are worse for Zola, whose family is about to be deported to Senegal, as illegal immigrants after twenty-six years of a tough life in the US.

Disheartened and disillusioned, the three decide to drop out of law school, head for the overcrowded courts and start hustling clients caught in minor cases, like drink driving, for cash payments. They rightly figure out that nobody will actually ask to see their licences. The set up a fake office about The Rooster Bar, where Todd is a part-time bartender, change their names and print cards for their phony law firm

For some time they are successful and dizzily happy at pulling off the stunt; it’s when Mark gets into a medical malpractice suit for big money that their deception starts to come apart at the seams. Their third rate college has not even equipped them with the basics they need to know to practice in courts.

In his author’s note, Grisham writes that his book was inspired by an investigative piece titled The Law School Scam, by Paul Campos, published in The Atlantic; around the facts he builds a somewhat convoluted by always absorbing thriller. The reader actually hopes the three get away with it, because the big guys who run their shady businesses seldom get caught. The book is not just an enjoyable read, but also wraps some eye-opening legal information in its pages.

The Rooster Bar

By John Grisham

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 374