What do you think?
Rate this book
Rules of Privilege
Dane Morgan graduates law school, hoping one day to score that “big case” that will make her a celebrity. But when the Big Case arrives, it’s in defense of her Uncle Deke, a career criminal who becomes the prime suspect in the murder of a stripper. Could her beloved uncle actually be a serial killer, responsible for the deaths of several women?Once her orderly world goes topsy-turvy, Dane wonders if she can be impartial in the case. Soon thereafter, she questions how far she’s willing to go to bring an end to the culprit’s murder spree.
298 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2012
3 people are currently reading
6 people want to read
About the author
Mike Farris
30 books13 followersMIKE FARRIS is a 1983 cum laude graduate of Texas Tech University School of Law, where he was an associate editor on the Texas Tech Law Review and was inducted into the prestigious Order of the Coif. Mike joined the Dallas firm of Vincent Lopez Serafino Jenevein, P.C., as Of Counsel in 2010, where his practice includes complex commercial litigation as well as entertainment law, focusing on the movie and publishing industries.
As a literary agent, Mike has placed several award-winning novels for publication, including Balaam Gimble’s Gumption by Mike Nichols, winner of the Texas Institute of Letters John Bloom Humor Award, and Sheldon Russell’s Dreams to Dust: A Tale of the Oklahoma Land Rush, winner of the Langum Prize for Excellence in American Historical Fiction. Mike also represents various university presses and has successfully placed subsidiary rights to their published books, including negotiating the sale of movie rights to producers and Hollywood studios.
Mike was the 2014 Chair of the Dallas Bar’s Sports and Entertainment Law Section, after serving as Vice-Chair in 2011 and previously serving as Chair in 2012 and 2009. He is also the editor of the State Bar of Texas Entertainment and Sports Law Journal and is an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas in its Sports & Entertainment Management MBA program, where he serves on the Sports & Entertainment Advisory Board. He has taught trial advocacy as an adjunct professor at Texas Wesleyan University Law School and creative writing at Richland College in Dallas.
Mike is much in demand as a presenter at writers’ conferences around the country, speaking on topics ranging from legal issues for writers and understanding publishing contracts to principles of cinematic storytelling. He created and taught a seminar sponsored by the Dallas Bar’s Sports and Entertainment Law Section entitled Beyond Briefs: Other Forms of Fiction Writing for Lawyers, and is a regular presenter at the La Jolla Writers Conference. He has taught seminars on the art and craft of adapting source material into screenplays, and has adapted the novels of Air Force U-2 pilot-turned-New York Times-best-selling novelist Patrick A. Davis (novels adapted are The Passenger and A Long Day for Dying), as well as the award-winning novel Balaam Gimble’s Gumption, by Mike Nichols, which was produced as a short film by Dallas’s Blue Logic Productions. As a screenwriter, he is a multi-time semifinalist in the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting and the Page International Screenwriting Awards. In 2014, his script The Catch was a Nicholl semifinalist, placing it in the top 3% out of 7,511 entries.
As a book writer, Mike collaborated with former ABC-TV anchorman Murphy Martin to write Martin’s memoir of his years in journalism, entitled Front Row Seat: A Veteran Reporter Relives the Four Decades That Reshaped America (Eakin Press). In 2009, the University of Oklahoma Press released Call Me Lucky: A Texan in Hollywood, Mike’s collaboration with rodeo cowboy-turned-actor/producer/director Robert Hinkle on Hinkle’s memoir of his years in show business. He is also the author of five published novels: Kanaka Blues (Savant Books), Manifest Intent (Savant Books), Rules of Privilege (Savant Books), The Bequest (Stairway Press), and Wrongful Termination (Untreed Reads). His thriller Every Pig Got a Saturday is set for a winter 2014-2015 release from John M. Hardy Press.
As a literary agent, Mike has placed several award-winning novels for publication, including Balaam Gimble’s Gumption by Mike Nichols, winner of the Texas Institute of Letters John Bloom Humor Award, and Sheldon Russell’s Dreams to Dust: A Tale of the Oklahoma Land Rush, winner of the Langum Prize for Excellence in American Historical Fiction. Mike also represents various university presses and has successfully placed subsidiary rights to their published books, including negotiating the sale of movie rights to producers and Hollywood studios.
Mike was the 2014 Chair of the Dallas Bar’s Sports and Entertainment Law Section, after serving as Vice-Chair in 2011 and previously serving as Chair in 2012 and 2009. He is also the editor of the State Bar of Texas Entertainment and Sports Law Journal and is an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas in its Sports & Entertainment Management MBA program, where he serves on the Sports & Entertainment Advisory Board. He has taught trial advocacy as an adjunct professor at Texas Wesleyan University Law School and creative writing at Richland College in Dallas.
Mike is much in demand as a presenter at writers’ conferences around the country, speaking on topics ranging from legal issues for writers and understanding publishing contracts to principles of cinematic storytelling. He created and taught a seminar sponsored by the Dallas Bar’s Sports and Entertainment Law Section entitled Beyond Briefs: Other Forms of Fiction Writing for Lawyers, and is a regular presenter at the La Jolla Writers Conference. He has taught seminars on the art and craft of adapting source material into screenplays, and has adapted the novels of Air Force U-2 pilot-turned-New York Times-best-selling novelist Patrick A. Davis (novels adapted are The Passenger and A Long Day for Dying), as well as the award-winning novel Balaam Gimble’s Gumption, by Mike Nichols, which was produced as a short film by Dallas’s Blue Logic Productions. As a screenwriter, he is a multi-time semifinalist in the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting and the Page International Screenwriting Awards. In 2014, his script The Catch was a Nicholl semifinalist, placing it in the top 3% out of 7,511 entries.
As a book writer, Mike collaborated with former ABC-TV anchorman Murphy Martin to write Martin’s memoir of his years in journalism, entitled Front Row Seat: A Veteran Reporter Relives the Four Decades That Reshaped America (Eakin Press). In 2009, the University of Oklahoma Press released Call Me Lucky: A Texan in Hollywood, Mike’s collaboration with rodeo cowboy-turned-actor/producer/director Robert Hinkle on Hinkle’s memoir of his years in show business. He is also the author of five published novels: Kanaka Blues (Savant Books), Manifest Intent (Savant Books), Rules of Privilege (Savant Books), The Bequest (Stairway Press), and Wrongful Termination (Untreed Reads). His thriller Every Pig Got a Saturday is set for a winter 2014-2015 release from John M. Hardy Press.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 25, 2017
As an attorney myself, I enjoy reading a good legal thriller, and, as I began to read Mike Farris' Rules of Privilege, I got ready to experience some courtroom theatrics courtesy of a skilled litigator/author calling upon this expertise to spice up the plot. In that regard at least, I was somewhat disappointed, because, out of the 350 or so pages in the book, only about ten take place in a courtroom, and they mostly involve a secondary case. Despite this lack of courtroom pyrotechnics and some other plotting problems, and despite a main character who is rather cliched, Rules of Privilege has a tricky story and an enjoyable supporting character that make it a decent read.
The main character in Rules of Privilege is Dane Morgan, an idealistic young attorney from a less than ideal background. She grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, and her interest in the law stems from her father's case, a man executed for his part in a robbery gone bad (this is Texas, you know). After graduating law school at the top of her class, Dane accepts an offer with the swankiest law firm in Dallas, only after getting assurance from the partner who mentors her than she’ll be allowed to do pro bono work.
Of course, almost every reader who has ever been exposed to a legal thriller is miles ahead of Dane here. What she finds out is that her mentor has lied to her about the pro bono work and made a very crude pass at her to boot. Dane winds up going to work for the exact opposite type of firm, a feisty sole practitioner (imagine Kathy Bates) who had been turned down by Dane a couple of years earlier. Pretty soon, Dane gets her big case, defending her Uncle Deke, a career petty criminal who becomes the prime suspect in the murder of a stripper who is the latest victim of an elusive serial killer. Dane begins to wonder if a man she has loved since childhood could actually have brutally murdered several women.
Author Farris seems to have borrowed some well-worn storytelling techniques from other thriller writers, none of which are used all that effectively here. The book begins with a flashforward chapter that reveals that a big plot point, but, in this case, it’s not handled all that well, so that the revelation quickly falls into the background as the story progresses. Further, although the book is written using Dane’s first-person narration, at times the author inserts third-person chapters describing some of the killings at which, obviously, Dane isn’t present. That gimmick is used too frequently. The book also gives readers a look at life in a big law firm, where beginning associates get paid lots of money to work enormous billable hours doing the grunt work the partners don’t want to do, which grueling work nets even larger amounts of money for those partners This was familiar territory for me, but may be interesting for other readers.
Dane doesn’t leave her big law firm until about the halfway point of Rules of Privilege, and, quite honestly, I thought I knew exactly how the book would go from there. I was wrong. The author has come up with a central plot that’s a lot trickier and more complex than I would have thought, with a couple of developments that threw me for a loop, I found myself pulled into an increasingly intricate plot, genuinely curious as to how it would turn out. The plot is highly incredible, but for a thriller, it stays just inside the realm of plausibility.
The author’s characterizations are also a mixed bag. As a heroine, I thought Dane a bit weak. She’s far too slow on the uptake and does some incredibly stupid things like go jogging alone at night even when she knows she’s being stalked by a highly dangerous criminal. But the author more than makes up for that with his depiction of Marla, Dane’s mentor, a feisty, hard-drinking, constitutional-rights-loving attorney who shows Dane the other side of the legal profession.
I found it difficult to assign a rating to Rules of Privilege. Parts of it are highly derivative, and the author’s choice of what conventions to adopt in his storytelling isn’t always the world’s best. Yet, his storyline throws in some highly original elements and manages to be quite inventive. I’m always a believer that the most important part of a book, especially something that’s intended as escapist reading, is the ending. Here, the author manages to bring all the elements together in the last couple of chapters in a highly satisfying manner, easing the annoyance I felt at a few of the earlier sections of the book. So, I give it 3.5 stars, rounded up to four due to the ending. This reviewer rules in favor of Rules of Privilege.
The main character in Rules of Privilege is Dane Morgan, an idealistic young attorney from a less than ideal background. She grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, and her interest in the law stems from her father's case, a man executed for his part in a robbery gone bad (this is Texas, you know). After graduating law school at the top of her class, Dane accepts an offer with the swankiest law firm in Dallas, only after getting assurance from the partner who mentors her than she’ll be allowed to do pro bono work.
Of course, almost every reader who has ever been exposed to a legal thriller is miles ahead of Dane here. What she finds out is that her mentor has lied to her about the pro bono work and made a very crude pass at her to boot. Dane winds up going to work for the exact opposite type of firm, a feisty sole practitioner (imagine Kathy Bates) who had been turned down by Dane a couple of years earlier. Pretty soon, Dane gets her big case, defending her Uncle Deke, a career petty criminal who becomes the prime suspect in the murder of a stripper who is the latest victim of an elusive serial killer. Dane begins to wonder if a man she has loved since childhood could actually have brutally murdered several women.
Author Farris seems to have borrowed some well-worn storytelling techniques from other thriller writers, none of which are used all that effectively here. The book begins with a flashforward chapter that reveals that a big plot point, but, in this case, it’s not handled all that well, so that the revelation quickly falls into the background as the story progresses. Further, although the book is written using Dane’s first-person narration, at times the author inserts third-person chapters describing some of the killings at which, obviously, Dane isn’t present. That gimmick is used too frequently. The book also gives readers a look at life in a big law firm, where beginning associates get paid lots of money to work enormous billable hours doing the grunt work the partners don’t want to do, which grueling work nets even larger amounts of money for those partners This was familiar territory for me, but may be interesting for other readers.
Dane doesn’t leave her big law firm until about the halfway point of Rules of Privilege, and, quite honestly, I thought I knew exactly how the book would go from there. I was wrong. The author has come up with a central plot that’s a lot trickier and more complex than I would have thought, with a couple of developments that threw me for a loop, I found myself pulled into an increasingly intricate plot, genuinely curious as to how it would turn out. The plot is highly incredible, but for a thriller, it stays just inside the realm of plausibility.
The author’s characterizations are also a mixed bag. As a heroine, I thought Dane a bit weak. She’s far too slow on the uptake and does some incredibly stupid things like go jogging alone at night even when she knows she’s being stalked by a highly dangerous criminal. But the author more than makes up for that with his depiction of Marla, Dane’s mentor, a feisty, hard-drinking, constitutional-rights-loving attorney who shows Dane the other side of the legal profession.
I found it difficult to assign a rating to Rules of Privilege. Parts of it are highly derivative, and the author’s choice of what conventions to adopt in his storytelling isn’t always the world’s best. Yet, his storyline throws in some highly original elements and manages to be quite inventive. I’m always a believer that the most important part of a book, especially something that’s intended as escapist reading, is the ending. Here, the author manages to bring all the elements together in the last couple of chapters in a highly satisfying manner, easing the annoyance I felt at a few of the earlier sections of the book. So, I give it 3.5 stars, rounded up to four due to the ending. This reviewer rules in favor of Rules of Privilege.
Displaying 1 of 1 review