A TAUT COMPELLING TALE OF LEGAL INTRIGUE
A taxi skids to a stop at a hospital’s emergency entrance on a rain-soaked Chicago night. A stricken black man staggers out, supported by his wife and his teenage son. A mislabeled CAT scan sends a simple procedure horribly awry. The hired hand of a two-bit ambulance chaser passes the wife a business card. Bertha Roosevelt’s begun a two-step with the sharks. Across the Atlantic, a veteran partner in an old Chicago law firm reviews a medical-malpractice contract with a powerful upstart of a London insurance company. Everything looks so clean and proper, so very British, that he doesn’t read the finest of the fine print: A flourish of a silver pen and the law firm of Wilson & Thompson is high on the sharks’ dance card. Back home, five young fortysomething up-and-comers at Wilson & Thompson—longtime friends of varied ethnicity—gather for drinks at their favorite sports bar. A breaking television news story stops their lazy chatter dead…and launches their last-man-standing marathon with each other—and the sharks. The Dance of the Sharks watches as power, pride, and raw ambition are paired with both honest integrity and sleek manipulation in a tangled tango on two equally slippery sides of the Pond. A pair of wildly different Chicago lawyers—a sex-and-drug-fueled heel whose family and friends are collateral damage in his climb to the top, and a grizzled shyster plotting a gilded retirement via a deceptively easy mark—find that sharks come in many more shapes and guises than they’d imagined, in uncommon habitats like the shores of Lake Michigan and the banks of the Thames.
