John GrishamCentury, £18.99

A core element of John Grisham’s work is the black-and-white presentation of good and evil – this is what makes his books so successful and also perhaps disappointing.

In this binary world the legal profession is, generally, on the side of evil. Returning in The Associate to the territory that made his name in The Firm, Grisham takes pot shots at large, amoral law firms and the Faustian pact their associates are forced to make, putting in inhuman hours for the prize of partnership and all the money a trophy wife can spend.

Kyle McAvoy is top of his class at Yale and intends to start his legal career helping immigrants facing deportation, inspired by his father, a small-town lawyer (the only decent lawyer in the book). But when Kyle is blackmailed with a video of a damaging incident from college days, he is forced to join Scully & Pershing, Wall Street’s largest and most brutal corporate practice, so he can deliver inside information from a massive Scully case to his blackmailers.

Scully is a firm where billing is all, where driving an associate’s wife’s car around the block for two hours because you cannot find a parking space while the more senior lawyers are in court – and charging the client $400 an hour for it – is positively a good idea. Grisham misses few opportunities to hammer this point home.

You could put up with this if it was a really good thriller. As ever, the characters have little depth with Grisham, but this time the plot does not save the book. The premise is fine but the story never changes gear – unlike The Firm, there are few twists and turns as it heads towards a climax. It remains curiously pedestrian, unexciting and uninvolving.

The Associate is readable enough, but less proselytising and more thrills would have made this a much better novel.