We all want to make good, and young lawyer Will Connelly is no exception. Will wants to get ahead, and as The Insider opens he's striving to make partner in his San Francisco law firm. Will works hard. In fact, on the day that will change his life he arrives at 6:30 a.m. to get a head start on clocking those billable hours. Will's working so hard that he pointedly ignores the phone call from a co-worker that, if he had answered it, might have saved his life. Or it might not. He'll never know for sure, but moments later he sees this co-worker plummet past the window of his office on the thirty-eighth floor.
Later that morning Will learns he's been made partner. He also learns that Ben Fisher--he who fell to a bloody death--had not. And that evening, while celebrating alone, Will meets a beautiful Russian office worker. Even at the best of times a one-night-stand is probably not the best of ideas. With the run of luck which started when Will's key card to the firm's building was found in his dead co-worker's possession, it's not at all a good idea.
Within twenty-four hours Will has been sucked into a practically incomprehensible vortex of threats, pain, and demands that are impossible to comply with. Will's pickup, the lovely Katya, has ties to a couple of Russian wannabe mobsters. The wannabes want Will to give them some insider information about a merger he's working on, one involving Jupiter Software, a company with a revolutionary encryption program. Events pile up upon one another, faster and faster; information comes from all directions, and is often misleading or wrong.
The action in The Insider, the first legal thriller from author (and lawyer) Reece Hirsch, is nonstop. Hirsch works the fabulous San Francisco setting, racing Will--and the reader--all around the city and its environs, including a mad chase through the feathers and leather of the Gay Pride Parade on Market Street. There are more deaths, bad guys are discovered in high places, and by novel's end Will Connelly has embarked upon a different sort of life. A most impressive first novel; I look forward to more from Reece Hirsch.