John Grisham’s three latest offerings are sure to excite his readership in several ways at the same time. The reviews are already in and heavily bi-modal; people like them or they don’t, and then they reverse positions on the other book/s. The reason is that the three are incompletely different voices; the good news is that you are certain to like at least one of them, and will probably not like one of them. Which is which will depend largely on you!
The Reckoning is the sort of book that Mr. Grisham wants to write. It is in the same vein as “A Time to Kill”, which was his first work and that usually indicates it’s the one he really had to write. It also went nowhere until he broke out with The Firm. The Reckoning starts out a bit weird in that the protagonist goes out and commits a very violent act pretty much in plain sight, so it seems improbable that the lawyers can get their man off – and apparently, that’s fine with him. In fact, although lawyers are necessarily involved in this type of event, they aren’t the centerpiece that one expects of a writer of legal thrillers, and the story wouldn’t change much if no mention were made of the lawyers at all. It’s a serious work, seeking perhaps to move into the “literature” category, addressing a couple of Grisham’s topics of interest (veterans’ issues and Old South racial tensions). It is not uplifting in any way. But it will probably keep you reading to find out why the protagonist did what he did.
The Rooster Bar goes in the other direction. It is indeed a lawyer story, again taking on social issues, in this case the student loan industry, private (commercial) law schools, and the effect of immigration laws on those who have decided to evade them. The base story is that four friends realize that their huge investment in law school are not likely to result in high-paying jobs immediately upon graduation. So they decide to quit law school and impersonate lawyers so they can sue the school and the industry. As many commenters have noted, this is a pretty idiotic premise, because 90 percent of the group’s problems would have been resolved had they simply completed their last semester and buckled down to pass the bar exam. For long-time Grisham readers, the more off-putting aspect of the book is the obvious catering to the stereotype of the millennial class, from the story-line to the dialog. But he’s in the commercial end of the business, and you can’t keep selling books to baby boomers much longer, so I can’t fault it as a marketing strategy; I’m just going to have to shift from automatic purchase into checking out the reviews before buying the next book.
Camino Island returns to the mainstream work that brought him fame and fortune. It too is not a lawyer story at all, in fact none of the major players is a lawyer. Its pacing and content places it squarely in the conventional thriller genre, and among his prior works it probably comes closest in flavor to the Pelican Brief. The situations are subtle, the locales are well-described, and the dialog is crisp. This one should find favor with fans of all types, even if no lawyers do come to grief.