Camino Ghosts by John Grisham

Published by Doubleday on May 28, 2024

John Grisham is at his best when he works racial injustice into his stories. In a 2022 interview, Grisham said he “grew up in the Jim Crow South. A very segregated, racist society was almost in my DNA. It’s a long struggle to overcome that and to look back at the way I was raised and not be resentful toward my parents and other people who helped raise me for their extreme racism. It was such a hard right-wing, racist society that I grew up in.”

Camino Ghosts is Grisham’s third novel set on Camino Island, a fictional location off the northeast coast of Florida. A central character is a descendent of slaves. The novel reminds the reader that Florida entered the union as a slave state. I assume that will be enough to get the novel banned in Florida’s school libraries because Ron DeSantis thinks it is wrong to offend the imagined sensibilities of white children by teaching them the truth about southern history. Most rational people believe children should be taught to learn from the past, but denial and ignorance are the preferred tools of education in today’s Florida.

The descendent in question is Lovely Jackson. Now about 80 years old, Lovely lives on Camino Island but was born on a nearby island that the locals call Dark Isle. The island is said to be haunted and enough people have died after venturing to the island that the legends are cautiously regarded as true.

Lovely wrote a book that recounted the oral history her ancestries passed down about their lives. The first island settlers had been captured in Africa for sale into slavery. A few Africans survived a shipwreck, killed the white survivors who enslaved them, and protected their new island home from white men.

Nalla was one of the survivors. Lovely is one of Nalla’s descendants. Nalla was raped by one of the slave traders and was pregnant with his child. She used the witchcraft she learned in her childhood to place a curse on the island. White men who set foot on the island are doomed. The curse has so far been completely effective.

Developers are itching to get their hands on Dark Isle because it has a beach. Until Hurricane Leo, building a bridge to the island was impractical. The hurricane changed the topography, making it possible for Tidal Breeze, an unscrupulous real estate developer, to demand that the state pay for a bridge so it can fill the beaches with condos for rich people. Most local residents are tired of developments that displace less affluent people with wealthy condo dwellers, although a few are persuaded that development brings economic benefits that outweigh the environmental destruction that has devastated Florida.

Steven Mahon is an environmental lawyer who wants to throw a wrench in Tidal Breeze’s plan to bulldoze Dark Isle. He realizes that, as the last inhabitant of Dark Isle, Nalla may have a claim to ownership of the island through adverse possession. Proving that Nalla owns the island would be the quickest way to prevent Tidal Breze from destroying it. The problem is that Nalla has no corroborating evidence to prove that she was born on Dark Isle or that her ancestors ever lived there. The state claims ownership of all uninhabited islands near Florida and Tidal Breeze has engineered a behind-the-scenes sweetheart deal to buy it from the state.

The story follows two characters who appeared in earlier Camino Island novels. Bruce Cable owns a successful independent bookstore that caters to island residents and tourists. Mercer Mann is a novelist who spends part of the year on the island. Mercer decides that Lovely has a story worth telling. Bruce is a fan of Lovely’s self-published book about the island and is responsible for the few sales that Lovely made. He encourages Mercer to tell Lovely’s story in a work of nonfiction and to bring Tidal Breeze into the narrative.

Political corruption and environmental destruction are two of the novel’s themes, from Tidal Breeze’s attempt to influence a judge to its use of campaign contributions to assure that state officials ignore the environmental consequences of its development projects. The larger theme is Florida’s history as a slave state and the continuing impact that slavery has had on the state’s Black residents. I was particularly moved by Lovely’s testimony that she wanted to tell her story because so many stories of slaves have not been told — a truth that seems particularly evident in Florida, where a majority of the state’s legislators seem to believe that stories about white slaveowners are best forgotten.

I am hot and cold on Grisham, but I enjoyed the trial scenes in Camino Ghosts. Lovely is a fun and sympathetic character. The plot is simple but compelling. The present day story might be too upbeat to be credible, but Grisham balances the good feelings with the harrowing reality of the slave trade. My primary reason for giving Camino Ghosts a strong recommendation is that it is so different from most legal thrillers. It’s always good to read something fresh in a genre that tends to rehash stale plots.

RECOMMENDED

The Exchange by John Grisham

Published by Doubleday on October 17, 2023

Mitch McDeere is the protagonist in John Grisham’s The Firm, a novel most readers seem to like more than I do (the movie, I thought, corrected the novel’s weak ending). Mitch McDeere is back in The Exchange, another novel that suffers from a disappointing ending.

Mitch and his wife fled from Memphis to avoid a revenge killing for bringing down a corrupt law firm — the story told in The Firm — and hid in Italy for a time. When the coast seemed clear, Mitch took a position in the New York office of the nation’s largest international law firm. Now it’s 2005, fifteen years after The Firm, and Mitch is a well-paid partner who travels the world litigating various business disputes, usually in an arbitration forum.

The firm’s Italian office represents a Turkish construction company that built a billion-dollar bridge over nothing in Libya, an ego-stroke project of Ghaddafi in which the dictator lost interest after the failure of a corresponding plan to divert a river so it would flow under the bridge.

Libya still owes the construction company $400,000 and isn’t paying. The head of the Italian office brought a claim against Libya in an international arbitration forum, but that lawyer is dying of cancer. He brings in Mitch to take over the case and persuades him to assign his daughter Giovanna, a young lawyer who works in the London office, to help him.

Mitch and Giovanna travel to Libya to rack up billable hours gazing at the  bridge. Giovanni is kidnapped on a field trip. The drivers and security specialists who accompanied her are beheaded or hung or otherwise executed in gruesome fashion.

Mitch is fortunate to have avoided the kidnapping/execution, but his convenient illness (doctors apparently never know why he alone got food poisoning, if that’s what it was) and his decision to send Giovanna to do his bridge gazing made little sense. I thought Grisham was setting up a deeper mystery that never materialized.

The novel begins with Mitch’s brief pro bono assignment to a death penalty appeal in Tennessee that ends when the prisoner commits suicide. I was hoping this might be a death penalty novel — that’s Grisham’s strength, in my view — but the opening quickly gives way to the story in Libya. I again thought Grisham was setting up a plot twist and the novel would circle back to Memphis. Again, I was disappointed.

Instead, the story is a fairly ordinary thriller about someone (maybe terrorists, maybe not) who kidnaps a dual citizen of the UK and Italy and threatens to kill her if a $100 million ransom isn’t paid. Mitch spends most of the novel flying here and there, trying to raise the ransom money from governments that pretend not to negotiate with terrorists but do so for the right hostage. Some of the novel’s best scenes involve Mitch’s frustration with the management committee of his law firm, which won’t risk taking out a line of credit to fund a large chunk of the ransom because that might reduce the firm’s quarterly profits.

Mitch’s wife becomes the contact point when the payoff instructions are delivered. The scenes involving Mitch’s terrified wife are tense and deftly executed.

Unfortunately, the rest of the novel feels like a half-told story. The kidnappers seem to know quite a bit about Mitch. Do they have a contact in his firm? Are they Americans seeking revenge for Mitch’s ratting out the Memphis firm? Who knows? Grisham seemed so set up several tantalizing possibilities, then leaves every question unanswered. The result is only a partially satisfying novel. I recommend The Exchange for its ability to build tension, but not for a story that feels like it should have been so much more.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Boys from Biloxi by John Grisham

Published by Doubleday on October 18, 2022

The Boys from Biloxi reads like a true crime story that is strong on exposition but weak on drama. Characters are stereotypes of crusading prosecutors and the criminals they put behind bars. John Grisham writes at least one dud for every good novel he pens. Despite some interesting moments, The Boys from Biloxi resides in the dud column.

The novel begins with a brief history of Biloxi in the twentieth century, a city with a prosperous seafood industry that ignored Prohibition, welcomed gamblers, and turned a blind eye to prostitution. The history focuses on Croatian immigrants and their contributions to Biloxi, primarily with good deeds and hard work, later supplemented by vice.

Hugh Malco and Keith Rudy enter the story in the late 1950s as Little League players. Hugh’s father, Lance Malco, is a rising star in Croatian crime, assisted by the muscle and violence of Nevin Noll. Lance becomes known as the Boss of the Dixie Mafia.

Keith’s father, Jesse Rudy, is a World War II veteran who marries a nurse, has four kids while teaching high school, and earns a law degree at night. He eventually gets fed up with corruption, particularly the DA’s failure to go after the sheriff, Fats Bowman, who is paid to ignore the gambling and prostitution that has made Biloxi famous.

Noll teaches Hugh to box. Keith sticks with baseball until he decides that helping his father run for DA would be a more productive use of his time. The criminal forces that run Biloxi paint Jesse as “soft on crime” because he defended criminals as a lawyer, while proclaiming the incumbent DA as “tough on crime” despite his failure to challenge corruption. The public buys it because ignorance and slogans are the driving force of politics. Graveyard votes seal the deal for the incumbent. And then a hurricane and unscrupulous insurance companies turn Jesse into a community hero.

The story follows Jesse has he moves from a civil practice to a career as a crusading prosecutor who promises to clean up corruption in Biloxi. Eventually the story focuses on Keith as he follows in his father’s footsteps. Their targets are the Malcos, Noll, and Bowman. The book plods along at a steady pace, occasionally enlivened by a murder. A story with so many prostitutes and gamblers should be more interesting, but Grisham plays the role of neutral reporter more than storyteller.

The Boys from Biloxi develops a fuel leak as it enters its third act. It doesn’t quite run out of gas, but it starts coasting as it nears the finish line. Legal thrillers typically depend on the drama of trials, but the trial at the end of the novel is far from riveting and leads to a foregone conclusion. The rest of the story reads like a prolonged epilogue, recapping the lives of central characters following the trial.

The novel’s later chapters focus on the death penalty, a topic about which Grisham has written with passion. The Boys from Biloxi is pretty much the opposite of The Chamber. It alludes to the troubling issues that surround capital punishment but fails to explore them.

Without spoiling a major plot point, I can say that one of the most interesting issues involves a prosecutor’s potential conflict of interest in pursuing the death penalty against a criminal who killed a family member of the prosecutor. Grisham handles the conflict in a scholarly way but deprives the issue of its emotional force.

Grisham could also have done more with the personal conflict between Hugh and Keith, close childhood friends who become enemies in adulthood. The story fails to milk the inherent drama of that changing relationship. The relationship arises as a troubling memory at the novel’s end, but the absence of any buildup robs the conflict of its power. It nevertheless furnishes the novel’s most compelling moment. This is another consequence of telling the story from the standpoint of a dispassionate and slightly bored third person observer. I have no problem with novelists telling stories in the third person, but I have a problem with novels that read like dry history texts.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Sparring Partners by John Grisham

Published by Doubleday on May 31, 2022

Sparring Partners collects three novellas. None have courtroom scenes, so readers looking for legal thrillers rather than human interest stories will probably be disappointed.

The best entry, buried in the middle, is closer in length to a short story. “Strawberry Moon” plays to John Grisham’s strength by exposing the injustice of putting people to death. The story follows the last hours in the life of Cody Wallace, who committed a series of burglaries with his brother when they were both teens. The last burglary went south and his brother died in a shootout with the homeowners. Cody didn’t have a gun or fire a shot but he was convicted and sentenced to death for murder. Southern states love their executions, so the governor isn’t going to save Cody. The story’s last pages, as a sympathetic guard gives Cody one last look at a strawberry moon, is consistent with Grisham’s best work.

The first novella, “Homecoming,” features recurring character Jake Brigance, the protagonist of Grisham’s most celebrated novel, A Time to Kill. Jake is scratching out a living as a lawyer in Ford County, but his role in the story is to scope out the trouble that his friend Mack Stafford might face if Stafford returns to Mississippi. Stafford forged signatures and made off with client funds, crimes that might have gone undetected. He wants to reconnect with his daughters but doesn’t know whether the coast is clear. Jake and Stafford’s bombastic lawyer do the legwork that allows Stafford to meet with his older daughter. The story leaves Stafford’s future unsettled while raising interesting questions about whether Stafford should bite the bullet if that’s what it takes to keep his daughter in his life. Otherwise, the story is only mildly interesting.

The title novella is “Sparring Partners.” A St. Louis personal injury lawyer, Rusty Malloy, has lost his knack for winning large verdicts. He just lost his fifth trial in a row. His firm is in debt. Thanks to a partnership agreement that their father insisted upon before he was disbarred and sent to prison. Rusty and his brother Kirk are stuck in the practice despite their mutual hatred. Despite not being a partner, Diantha Bradshaw manages the firm and provides the only bridge between the brothers. The relationship between the brothers becomes nastier than usual when their father schemes to get out of prison early, while the brothers scheme to profit from his continuing incarceration. Only Diantha is smart enough to find a way to avoid the worst consequences of the Malloy family’s implosion.

“Sparring Partners” is notable for its inside look at how law firms owned by family members operate, how lawyers might be tempted by the dark side of money, and how cases of financial fraud are built. The plot is straightforward, holding no surprises despite its intrigue. The characters are unlikable. Even Diantha is driven by self-interest more than integrity or respect for the law. The story doesn’t evoke an emotional response, although it does have something useful to say about the ugly intersection of money, politics, and law firms.

John Grisham will never win awards for his prose style, but he has a knack for stripping a story down to its essence and keeping it moving. I’m not a huge Grisham fan — I’d rather read legal thrillers by Scott Turow or John Lescroart — but he excels at offering an insider’s perspective on the dysfunction of the legal system.

RECOMMENDED

The Judge's List by John Grisham

Published by ‎ Doubleday on October 19, 2021

Legal thriller fans should expect few thrills in the latest Grisham novel. Nor does the novel have any of the courtroom theatrics that make legal thrillers so compelling. The story’s interest lies in its focus on a lawyer who works for an inconsequential state agency charged with regulating judges, a thankless job that comes with a small budget and little legislative interest in acknowledging that judges ever break the rules.

Jeri Crosby’s father was murdered. The killer was never identified. Jeri has dedicated her life to finding him. She concludes that several other people were victims of the same killer, a conclusion that seem obvious given that the killer strangled each victim with identical lengths of identical rope that he tied around their necks with identical knots. Having identified a pattern that the FBI didn’t notice, Jeri looks for someone who has a connection to every victim. That someone turns out to be Judge Ross Bannick.

Now Jeri could give the FBI a gift-wrapped case, but she instead takes her evidence to Lacy Stoltz, a lawyer at a Florida board that regulates judges. (Lacy was apparently a character in The Whistler, a Grisham novel I haven’t read.) Jeri claims to be worried that the FBI will not protect her from the judge but believes Lacy can safely investigate her complaint if she files it anonymously. Lacy agrees, somewhat reluctantly, and only because the evidence of guilt, although circumstantial, is pretty compelling.

The story tracks Lacy’s investigation, although Jeri has done all the legwork, giving Lacy little to do. Later in the novel, Jeri decides to spice up the plot by taunting the judge, placing herself and Lacy at risk and setting up traditional but low-key thriller scenes. I didn’t buy Jeri’s reckless behavior given how often she tells Laci of her fears and the care she has taken to investigate without being noticed. But then, I didn’t buy the notion of a regulatory agency investigating a judge for murder. I suspect that Grisham contrived this plot as an excuse to revive Lacy as a character.

I give Grisham credit for not overplaying the drama when the judge goes after Jeri and Lacy. Still, the whole story is a bit dull. Tangential plots (Jeri is hoping for an injury settlement, her sketchy brother wants to take advantage of her when it is finalized, Jeri’s relationship with her boyfriend is uncertain) do nothing to enliven the story. I’m not a huge Grisham fan, although he’s certainly done some good work. I wouldn’t put The Judge’s List on my relatively shortlist of good Grisham legal thrillers.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS