Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The man they were about to kidnap had not always been called Silva. As a lawyer - Patrick S. Lanigan - he had had a previous life which ended in a car crash in February 1992. Six weeks after his death, $90 million disappeared from his law firm. It was then that his partners knew he was still alive.

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They found him in Ponta PorÒ, a pleasant little town in Brazil, on the border of Paraguay, in a land still known as the Frontier. They found him living in a shaded brick house on Rua Tiradentes, a wide avenue with trees down the center and barefoot boys dribbling soccer balls along the hot pavement. They found him alone, as best they could tell, though a maid came and went at odd hours during the eight days they hid and watched. They found him living a comfortable life but certainly not one of luxury.  The house was modest and could've been owned by any local merchant.  The car was a 1983 Volkswagen Beetle, manufactured in Sao Paulo with a million others.  It was red and clean, polished to a shine.  Their first photo of him was snapped as he waxed it just inside the gate to his short driveway. They found him much thinner, down considerably from the two hundred and thirty pounds he'd been carrying when last seen.  His hair and skin were darker, his chin had been squared, and his nose had been slightly pointed.  Subtle changes to the face.  They'd paid a steep bribe to the surgeon in Rio who'd performed the alterations two and a half years earlier. They found him after four years of tedious but diligent searching, four years of dead ends and lost trails and false tips, four years of pouring good money down the drain, good money chasing bad, it seemed. But they found him.  And they waited.  There was at first the desire to snatch him immediately, to drug him and smuggle him to a safe house in Paraguay, to seize him before he saw them or before a neighbor became suspicious.  The initial excitement of the finding made them consider a quick strike, but after two days they settled down and waited.  They loitered at various points along Rua Tiradentes, dressed like the locals, drinking tea in the shade, avoiding the sun, eating ice cream, talking to the children, watching his house.  They tracked him as he drove downtown to shop, and they photographed him from across the street as he left the pharmacy.  They eased very near him in a fruit market and listened as he spoke to the clerk.  Excellent Portuguese, with the very slight accent of an American or a German who'd studied hard.  He moved quickly downtown, gathering his goods and returning home, where he locked the gate behind him.  His brief shopping trip yielded a dozen fine photos. He had jogged in a prior life, though in the months before he disappeared his mileage shrunk as his weight ballooned.  Now that he teetered on the brink of emaciation, they were not surprised to see him running again.  He left his house, locking the gate behind him, and began a slow trot down the sidewalk along Rua Tiradentes.  Nine minutes for the first mile, as the street went perfectly straight and the houses grew farther apart.  The pavement turned to gravel on the edge of town, and halfway into the second mile his pace was down to eight minutes a mile and Danilo had himself a nice sweat.  It was midday in October, the temperature near eighty, and he gained speed as he left town, past a small clinic packed with young mothers, past a small church the Baptists had built.  The roads became dustier as he headed for the countryside at seven minutes a mile. The running was serious business, and it pleased them mightily.  Danilo would simply run into their arms. The day after the first sighting, a small unclean cottage on the edge of Ponta PorÒ was rented by a Brazilian named Osmar, and before long the rest of the pursuit team poured in.  It was an equal mix of Americans and Brazilians, with Osmar giving the orders in Portuguese and Guy barking in English.  Osmar could handle both lang Excerpted from The Partner: A Novel by John Grisham All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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Publishers Weekly Review

Money is essentially the principal character in Grisham's new thriller. It is a very large sum of it‘$90 million, to be exact‘that has motivated Gulf Coast lawyer Patrick Lanigan to concoct a scheme to disappear that is even more elaborate (if less convincing) than the one in the recent The Big Picture. It is money that drove a crooked defense contractor to try to pry loose a huge sum from Washington, and got Patrick's greedy law firm involved in the first place. And it is varying sums of money that enable Patrick to bribe his way out of a collection of indictments against him a yard long‘including one for first-degree murder‘when he is eventually found in his Brazilian hideaway and brought back to the U.S. to face the music. Already, at the end of The Runaway Jury, Grisham was displaying his fascination with the techniques of moving huge sums rapidly around the world, and here it becomes a key plot device. Even when tortured by his captors, Patrick can say he doesn't know where the money is, because only his Brazilian lover, fellow lawyer Eva Miranda, really knows‘and no one knows where she is. To call the plot of The Partner mechanical is at least partly a compliment: it is well-oiled, intricate and works smoothly. But its cynicism is remorseless: Lanigan is hardly a hero to warm to, despite his ingenuity (he puts on a lot of weight before his disappearance, just so he can take it off later and look altogether different). He is all calculation, and when it seems, at the end, as if someone has double-crossed him too, it is difficult to muster any sympathy. In Grisham's world money rules, and it is a sign of weakness to ignore its power. Not that the author is likely to do so, anyway; every indication is that his latest will rake it in once again. 2.8 million first printing; major ad/promo; Literary Guild, Doubleday Book club and Mystery Guild main selections; simultaneous audio. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Author notes provided by Syndetics

John Grisham was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas on February 8, 1955. He received a bachelor's degree in accounting from Mississippi State University. He was admitted to the bar in Mississippi in 1981 after receiving a law degree from the University of Mississippi, specializing in criminal law. While a lawyer in private practice in Southaven, Mississippi, Grisham served as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 until 1990. He left the law and politics to become a full-time author.

His first novel, A Time to Kill, was published in 1989. His other novels include The Partner, The Street Lawyer, The Testament, The Brethren, The Summons, The King of Torts, Bleachers, The Last Juror, The Broker, Playing for Pizza, The Appeal, Calico Joe, The Racketeer, Gray Mountain, Rogue Lawyer, The Confession, The Litigators, The Whistler, Camino Island, The Rooster Bar, and the Theodore Boone series. Several of his novels were adapted into films including The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Chamber, A Painted House, The Runaway Jury, and Skipping Christmas.

(Bowker Author Biography)