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Extortion, tech fears entangle Grisham’s ‘Associate’

Start with sex, lies and videotapes. Throw in extortion, blackmail, murder and corporate espionage. It all adds up to “The Associate,” a vintage legal thriller from John Grisham, master of the genre.

Not since the author’s 1991 “The Firm,” with its young hero Mitch McDeere, has a fledgling lawyer been pushed so hard against the wall of corruption — until he starts pushing back. Kyle McAvoy, 25, from York, Pa., shows outward docility but soon reveals his inner spunk.

McAvoy is editor in chief of “The Yale Law Journal,” and he’s planning, upon graduation, to lend his considerable talents to helping migrant workers.

But a band of operatives of unknown affiliation has other plans for him. The members want McAvoy to accept a job offer from Scully & Pershing, one of the world’s biggest law firms, and act as their spy. It’s a directive he’s afraid to ignore.

These thugs have in their possession a cell-phone video taken five years earlier that captures a drunken frat-boy party that resulted in a young woman accusing McAvoy and several of his pals of rape.

Charges were dismissed, and McAvoy is sure he didn’t have sex with the girl, but an arrest and a trial wouldn’t help his legal career.

McAvoy heads to New York — a brand-new setting for a Grisham novel — where he’s expected to hijack millions of pages of documents related to a lawsuit connected to the development of a new high-tech aircraft.

There seems to be no way out. He is watched 24 hours a day, his phone is bugged, his e-mails monitored. He’s afraid to confess his predicament to his small-town lawyer father, his girlfriend, his new place of employment or law enforcement.

The story is all the more compelling because McAvoy doesn’t know who’s blackmailing him. Is it one of the law firms involved in the suit, one of the clients or a domestic or international intelligence operation?

But McAvoy finds ways and means to climb out from under this mess — and readers will be rooting for him all the way.

McAvoy’s fight for survival against seemingly overwhelming odds is a fitting one for our times. The ending is unexpected, and it’s a toss-up whether readers will be satisfied or hunger for more.

And readers will get to relive McAvoy’s legal nightmares all over again in the film version from Paramount, with Shia LaBeouf set to star.