54 pages • 1 hour read
John GrishamThe Partner
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section and the source text contain descriptions of abduction and torture, and references to the death penalty.
Patrick Lanigan is living under the false name of Danilo Silva in the Brazilian town of Ponta Pora. Four years earlier, Patrick had faked his own death and absconded with $90 million stolen from his law firm and their client. The firm and client, Benny Aricia, were engaged in fraud against the US government and Patrick, who was not complicit in the scheme, stole the proceeds and faked his own death. Aricia and two insurance companies have spent millions of dollars looking for Patrick to retrieve the money. The insurance companies had paid lucrative policies out to Patrick’s wife and firm over his death and the theft.
Jack Stephano runs a successful detective agency and has been hired to find Patrick. His best tracer, Guy, locates Patrick. He and his team abduct Patrick while he is out running. They have been watching him for weeks, and they notice he is running a little faster than usual that day, but they think nothing of it. They drug him and take him hostage in a cabin in the hills of Paraguay. Guy phones Stephano to tell him they have Patrick and they will begin torturing him when the drugs wear off.
While Patrick is drugged, Guy’s men break into Patrick’s house, searching for the money or anything that might help them find it. The silent alarm alerts the security company whose instructions are to telephone Patrick’s girlfriend Eva Miranda.
Chapter 2 Summary
Eva is a lawyer with a law firm in Rio. She and Patrick had made plans for this eventuality. She moves the money from an offshore holding trust in Bermuda and starts wiring it around various banks in the Caribbean to hide it from both Patrick’s captors and Patrick himself. The plan is that Patrick won’t be able to tell them where it is.
With the money safe, her next call is the FBI in Biloxi, Mississippi. Asking for Agent Joshua Cutter, the agent in charge of the search for Patrick, she tells him Patrick has just been captured by Jack Stephano and that she thinks his life is in danger.
Meanwhile, Guy finds nothing useful in Patrick’s house. He begins to interrogate Patrick under torture, also using sodium thiopental, a “truth drug.” Guy is uncomfortable with the torture, but he has consulted an expert on the effect of the drug in combination with torture and goes ahead despite his reservations. Despite the drug, Patrick can’t tell them where the money is. He rambles about how he traveled around the world a bit before settling down in Ponta Pora. He admits that he left a wife and child behind when he disappeared and that he watched his own funeral from a distance.
A pair of FBI agents visit Stephano in his office and demand that he turns Patrick over to him unharmed. Stephano is stunned that they have found out he had abducted Patrick.
Chapter 3 Summary
Guy’s torture methods move from sodium thiopental to electric shock, causing second and third degree burns to Patrick. Patrick still can’t tell them where the money is. Guy already knows that 45 days after Patrick’s staged death, the $90 million was wired to his former firm’s account. Patrick posed as one of the partners and had it wired to a bank in Malta. After that, the trail goes cold.
Eva goes to a rented apartment in Curitiba where Patrick stores all his records. She gathers everything up and starts another round of wire transfers to keep the money moving. She leaves with their emergency stash of cash, credit cards and her fake passport in the name of Leah Pirez.
Chapter 4 Summary
The FBI comes to Stephano’s house and threatens him with arrest and prosecution if he doesn’t turn over Patrick. Jack Stephano’s wife is distressed by the FBI agents visiting their house and attracting the attention of the neighbors. Stephano phones Guy and tells him the money is under the control of Eva Miranda. Guy is already looking for Eva. Stephano tells Guy to prepare Patrick to be handed over to the FBI and make sure he’s not hurt. Guy tells him it’s too late for that.
Eva tells her father she will be in Europe working for a client and the client is a little shady and might send people to investigate her. She cancels all her appointments at her law firm and flies to Buenos Aires, then New York, then Zurich.
Guy and his men clean Patrick up, treat his burns and transport him to a small airport. The FBI takes over and transports Patrick to a military hospital in Puerto Rico where he is treated for his burns and kept under sedation to deal with his pain.
Chapter 5 Summary
Agent Cutter informs Patrick’s old partners that Patrick has been found. They are both relieved and vengeful. They have gone bankrupt, been divorced by their wives, and publicly disgraced. They are very hopeful they can get the money back, particularly the 30% owed to them as their fee for facilitating the whistleblower scheme that won their client the $90 million.
Four years earlier, Patrick had apparently died in a car crash fire. Agent Cutter goes next to see Trudy Lanigan, Patrick’s “widow.” Trudy inherited two life insurance policies totaling $2.5 million. She now lives with her long-time boyfriend Lance, who was her childhood sweetheart. Trudy is horrified to learn that Patrick has been found. She is happy in her new life and the insurance company will now sue her for the return of their money.
Chapter 6 Summary
The FBI arrests Jack Stephano for “harboring” a federal fugitive. While they are holding him, they search and secure his office, and bug his house. After the FBI lets him go on his own recognizance, he meets with Benny Aricia, the client who blew the whistle on his own employer’s crooked business practices. Benny looks forward to hearing the recording of Patrick’s torture. He also asks whether Eva has been located.
Patrick is indicted for the theft while he is still sedated in the hospital. The prosecutors are debating also seeking the death penalty for murder because there was a body found burned in the car crash in which Patrick was believed to have died. Now that it is known not to be Patrick’s body, they believe that he murdered someone to use as a decoy. They agree that the state will prosecute Patrick for the presumed murder and the FBI will pursue the theft.
Chapter 7 Summary
Eva sees the news from her Swiss hotel. She is relieved to know Patrick is alive. She wonders how badly he is hurt and how much he told them about the money. Patrick is awake but in pain and confused by the drugs in his system. He wonders where Eva is and if she has the money. Stephano meets with Guy at a Holiday Inn. Guy has the tapes from the interrogation. Stephano calls Benny Aricia to watch the tapes. Aricia sadistically enjoys the tapes.
Chapter 8 Summary
Aricia files a suit against Patrick for the stolen money. Patrick’s old law firm sues Patrick for their lost $30 million fee. Trudy sues Patrick for divorce. The life insurance company sues Trudy for return of the life insurance payout. The insurance company sues the law firm for the return of the $4 million they paid to cover Aricia’s loss. A grand jury indicts Patrick for capital murder—a murder committed in the perpetration of another crime, in this case, grand larceny. The sentence for this crime is death by lethal injection.
The Honorable Judge Karl Huskey is an old friend of Patrick’s. He gets himself assigned to Patrick’s case in the interim; he will have to recuse himself before any major trial decisions will have to be made but can oversee the case until then.
Chapter 9 Summary
Patrick is healing well. While the wounds are still fresh, he pays an orderly, Luis, to take pictures of his burns and abrasions. Soon after, Patrick is transported back to the US.
Trudy is in distress because the press is invading her privacy and the lawsuit is threatening to take her money away. She and Lance have been burning through the money on travel and luxuries. Lance has made some income running illegal drugs but this doesn’t support their extravagant lifestyle. Lance proposes that they kill Patrick. If he is dead, the life-insurance claim will be valid again.
Chapter 10 Summary
Sandy McDermott is an old lawyer friend of Patrick’s. He receives a visit at his New Orleans office from Eva, calling herself Leah. She tells him Patrick wants Sandy to represent him in the trial. They fly together to Biloxi after which Eva flies to South Beach, Florida. She wants to go home, but Patrick has warned her she may be followed.
Chapters 1-10 Analysis
The first part of the novel assembles all the major characters and establishes their motives. The novel rapidly populates a network of Patrick’s allies and enemies, setting up the richly-peopled background of a legal thriller, containing a multitude of interlinking character and motives. As is characteristic in the genre, Grisham begins in the middle of Patrick’s story (or in media res) with the abduction and slowly unfolds the backstory a piece at a time through other characters’ questions and interactions. This non-chronological approach sets up suspense and creates momentum from the outset as the story begins at a point of high tension and action. The gradual unravelling of the detail also enables the narrative to follow the legal and forensic procedure which is key to a legal drama. Through this procedure, the influence of Money and Corruption on actions and motivations are revealed, a major theme of the novel.
The abduction and torture scenes establish Guy, Stephano, and Aricia as real villains, as does their sadistic attitude toward the recordings. Aricia is the cruelest and most sadistic character and drives the behavior of the others in the criminal cabal. The scenes of torture create heightened action and emotion, relying on sensationalized descriptions which are characteristic of the crime and thriller genres more broadly. They also garner sympathy for Patrick despite the flaws already evident in his character—his theft of the money, and his calculating and manipulative nature. The narrative nudges readers to root for Patrick and hope the others will be punished not because he is good but because they are worse. The criminal characters being established as villains, the narrative supports Patrick’s as a classic anti-hero in relation to the theft. At this point in the novel, the possible murder of the body in Patrick’s car is an unanswered mystery. The novel relies on literary convention here: As Patrick has been set up as a heist-style anti-hero, the reader can assume there must be a (relatively) innocent explanation for the body. The traditional mystery is turned its head because the reader is waiting to discover how Patrick didn’t commit the murder, not how he did.
The narrative reveals quickly that Patrick and Eva already have a shared plan of action. This revelation adds to the suspense, as the narrative contains several plans running in tandem and displaying the different hopes and motives of the characters. From the outset, therefore, the novel sets up the idea that Patrick and Eva may outwit their pursuers, whether these are criminals or members of the justice system. The scene in Chapter 7 helps to establish Patrick and Eva’s affection for each other and creates pathos in portraying them as partners separated from one another in a time of crisis. Suspense is also created, however, by withholding from the reader knowledge of whether Eva is following the plan exactly or acting in her own interests. This prefigures and enable the final ending of the novel when Eva absconds with the money.
In this opening section, however, Eva is established as a sympathetic character when she calls her father in the midst of her hurried scramble to set Patrick’s plan in motion. Like all the sympathetic characters in the story, she has close family attachments. The portrayal of family relationships is a strong strand in this section and gestures to the theme of Freedom and Connection. Family is introduced with Eva’s father and Stephano’s wife. Stephano is influenced by his wife to cooperate with the FBI, and his family attachment balances against his cold-hearted acceptance of Patrick’s torture. Eva’s close relationship with her father influences her later choices and the breakdown of her relationship with Patrick. Family is also important to the portrayal of Sandy and Huskey, who are both devoted to their families. They are shown to be honest and to have meaningful work. With their questions, they give Patrick the opportunity to tell the story of the original heist and escape. The backstory is both entertaining in itself and justifies Patrick’s actions to an extent. Sandy and Huskey also show the reader that Patrick is capable of inspiring the friendship and loyalty of good people.
The portrayal of moral characters is important to counterbalance Patrick’s calculating nature. His estranged wife Trudy illustrates a different family dynamic. Trudy is created as an unsympathetic character, almost comically avaricious. She has been married twice for money and status but only loved Lance, whom she has no intention of marrying. Lance himself is engaged in criminal activity and Trudy is complicit. She feels no regret at Patrick’s supposed death. Her disinterest leaves Patrick free to pursue his new life. In fact, her poisonous influence actively drives him away. The character and behavior of Trudy helps to justify Patrick’s action in deserting her to the reader.
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