A Fool's Gold: A Story of Ancient Spanish Treasure, Two Pounds of Pot, and the Young Lawyer Almost Left Holding the Bag
Books / Hardcover
Books › Biography & Autobiography › Lawyers & Judges
ISBN: 1596910992 / Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, January 2006
The author of Where the Rivers Ran Backward describes how, as a young lawyer fresh out of law school, he took a job with Thaddeus Silk, a charistmatic but shady attorney whose unexpected death leaves him caught in the middle between eccentric clients and law enforcement in offbeat cases that will take years to unravel. 40,000 first printing.
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Recently out of law school, Bill Merritt takes a job working for a slightly shady but charismatic lawyer named Thaddeus Silk, who promises to be a good, if somewhat eccentric, mentor. But after just a few months, Thaddeus drops dead from a heart attack, and Bill, with precious little experience, is left to pick up the pieces of his chaotic and ill-managed practice. Before he can even start to make sense of the mess that was Thaddeus's legal life, the police are knocking at his door, and Bill is being accused of fencing stolen treasure.A week or so after Thaddeus's death, Bill inherits his first real clients, Abby Birdsong and Grady Jackson, whose files are among the boxes and papers and bourbon bottles that litter his office. Abby is a middle-aged, overweight, hippie ex-logger who has been caught with some of the oldest, foulest marijuana imaginable. Grady, known around town as the Crazy Man of Neahkahnie Mountain, is a lawyer's dream, or so Bill thinks. For ten years, he has paid Thaddeus Silk & Associates to sue the state of Oregon for permission - which has never been granted - to dig holes in a state-owned beach. To Bill, it seems like an expensive way to go crazy, but Grady is single-minded in his pursuit. He believes chests of Spanish gold are buried on Neahkahnie Mountain, and he wants the state to let him dig them up.As legal matters heat up and Bill hears there's a warrant for his arrest just waiting for a judge's signature, the cases of the skunky pot and the mythical Spanish treasure collide in ways that seem too fantastic to be true. It took nineteen years for Bill to finally puzzle out the details - how Thaddeus and Bill, Abby and Grady, assorted law enforcement officials and colorful local hangers-on all overlap and interconnect.
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