The Pelican Brief

I like John Grisham about every 4th or 5th book. His Rainmaker was terrific, and The Firm was rather sweet too. This novel, his third after The Firm and A Time to Kill, was crap--serious diarrhea. Grisham has stated in interviews he writes a book every six months. Reading the prose of this novel, I'm surprised he didn't do it in six weeks or even six days.

Where do I start in listing all the horrible aspects of this novel? I don't know but here goes:

- The flat, flat characters. None of the characters have any personalities to speak of--no distinguishing traits, no quirks, no hobbies, nothing. They simply exist to move the plot along.

- The boilerplate, cliched dialog. This is the novel where characters say stuff like "Let's go for a walk," followed up, "Wow, this is a nice walk." It's THAT bad. And when people get mad, they say stuff like, "I'll sue you for a million bucks if you touch me." Ohh, God, reading the dialog must've lowered my IQ to Forrest Gump levels.

- The dead prose. Buildings are either "small" or "big." And people, when mad, "snort" and "sneer." Of course, some people might say, "Well, Grisham's going for a minimalist approach." Well, there's good minimalist prose and there's crap minimalist prose--Grisham's the latter. If you want GREAT, unique minimalist prose, read James Ellroy. If you want to read prose apparently written by a high-schooler, read Grisham here.

- The plot. This story is essentially one entire chase sequence, and not a very interesting one at that. I won't dis the totally unrealistic nature of this story--it goes with the thriller territory--but I don't want to spend how many hours reading about flat characters hiding in hotels and saying stupid, kindergarten stuff that are in really bad B-list movies.

So . . . in conclusion, this is a really terrible, terrible novel. It's not as terrible as, say, a James Patterson novel, but it's close. If you haven't read Grisham before, stay away from this novel and read The Rainmaker instead. And The Firm and The Innocent Man. Everything else you can pretty much ignore. And if you're a masochist, well, why don't skip Grisham altogether and read James Patterson or Clive Cussler or Allan Folsom.

Grisham is a great writer and started great with his first three novels with this being his third. I give a five star rating when I can't stop turning the pages and do not want to put the book down. The story has backgrounds in New Orleans. Washington, D.C., and New York City.

This story was non-stop action and suspense with rivetting excitment. It has a heroine, Darby Shaw, who is beautiful and smart. She is a law student who does a Brief on the murder of two Supreme Court Justices. This causes a lot of people to be murdered and puts Darby on a run for her life. This all started with an injunction to stop oil drilling in the marshes of Louisiana and try to save the home of the Brown Pelicans.

If you are thinking about going to law school, this wouldn't be a bad novel to read to get a sense of what the profession is all about before you commit yourself to three expensive (and potentially boring) years of education. I don't recall a book that displays so many of the corrupt sides of legal practice and education in a single fictional tale. If that weren't enough, the book also delves deeply into the international assassination genre and creates a modern-day fictional version of investigating a government cover-up at the highest levels, a la Watergate.

But a pure heart among all the jaded ones can make a difference . . . that's the morale of this story as beautiful, dedicated, and brilliant law student Darby Shaw speculates on what motive might tie the assassination of two Supreme Court justices back to a pending legal case. Improbably (the weakest part of the story), she sniffs out the potential that no one else does -- that this is an attempt to fix an appeal.

The Pelican Brief as a title is a misnomer. Darby writes her thoughts (a crude essay, not a brief) about what might be going on and shares them with her professor lover who passes them along to a counsel for the FBI. Pretty soon someone is taking her ideas seriously, and the pages will fly through your fingers as fast as you can read until you get to the end.

John Grisham doesn't quite have his genres down in this book, and apparently the success of The Firm meant that his editors were more interested in getting The Pelican Brief published than making it better. You could fix this novel into a five-star effort with about two hours of editing to reduce the improbabilities and speed up the slow parts.

But if you don't mind having unlikely events pull a riveting story together, you'll have a lot of fun with The Pelican Brief. I listened to the reading by Alexander Adams and felt that the story worked better listened to than it would be if read silently.

I admire John Grisham for the imagination to conceive of such a wild story. He kept surprising me with his plot developments, and the trip was almost all fun.

Rather shocked to see any negative reviews. This book is a wonderful page turner. I was lost in the world of small intelligent law student, fighting for her life inside the world of DC powerhouses and the elite rich. Gripping. I still think about the book often, and I read it about 6 years ago. Great read.

Washington wakes up to the gruesome news that two members of the Supreme Court have been murdered overnight. The shocking part was in their diversity. The old, should have retired years ago, Democrat Justice Rosenberg and the younger Republican Justice Jensen. The fact that they were almost always on opposite sides of any issue left law enforcement with no clear political motive. The only clues left behind seemed to be ones of the killer's choosing. A nylon cord used to garrote Jensen as he sat in a movie house watching a porno film. The Rosenberg affair was messy - three people dead, three 22-caliber bullets to the head of each victim Rosenberg, a guard and an aid.
Down in bayou country Tulane University law professor Thomas Callahan on hearing the news got roaring drunk to ease the pain. Rosenberg was one of his idols and he couldn't believe the end had come.
While the whole country pondered the reason behind the killings Darby Shaw, a bright law student and bed partner of professor Callahan turns sleuth. Ms. Shaw pores over the current Supreme Court docket and eventually comes up with a promising case. And for the next four days she shuffles through pages of affidavits detailing lies and abuses by lawyers and their clients.
In the end Darby Shaw writes an eight-page draft of what will later be called the Pelican Brief. Shaw is only half convinced that she is on to something, however, in spite of her skepticism she turns the pages over to Callahan.
Callahan attends the Rosenberg funeral in Washington and passes the brief along to a colleague. And once copies of those pages get into the wrong hands Darby Shaw becomes the hunted.
John Grisham takes us through a fast paced cat and mouse investigation, and in the end solves the puzzle to everyone's satisfaction.

Tom Barnes author of:
`The Goring Collection'
`The Hurricane Hunters and Lost in the Bermuda Triangle'
`Doc Holliday's Road to Tombstone'
The Goring Collection
The Hurricane Hunters And Lost in the Bermuda Triangle
Doc Holliday's Road to Tombstone: The Life and Times of John Henry Holliday