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Summary
Summary
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER * "A delightfully lighthearted caper ... [a] fast-moving, entertaining tale."-- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A gang of thieves stage a daring heist from a secure vault deep below Princeton University's Firestone Library. Their loot is priceless, but Princeton has insured it for twenty-five million dollars.
Bruce Cable owns a popular bookstore in the sleepy resort town of Santa Rosa on Camino Island in Florida. He makes his real money, though, as a prominent dealer in rare books. Very few people know that he occasionally dabbles in the black market of stolen books and manuscripts.
Mercer Mann is a young novelist with a severe case of writer's block who has recently been laid off from her teaching position. She is approached by an elegant, mysterious woman working for an even more mysterious company. A generous offer of money convinces Mercer to go undercover and infiltrate Bruce Cable's circle of literary friends, ideally getting close enough to him to learn his secrets.
But eventually Mercer learns far too much, and there's trouble in paradise as only John Grisham can deliver it.
Don't miss John Grisham's new book, THE EXCHANGE: AFTER THE FIRM!
Author Notes
John Grisham was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas on February 8, 1955. He received a bachelor's degree in accounting from Mississippi State University. He was admitted to the bar in Mississippi in 1981 after receiving a law degree from the University of Mississippi, specializing in criminal law. While a lawyer in private practice in Southaven, Mississippi, Grisham served as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 until 1990. He left the law and politics to become a full-time author.
His first novel, A Time to Kill, was published in 1989. His other novels include The Partner, The Street Lawyer, The Testament, The Brethren, The Summons, The King of Torts, Bleachers, The Last Juror, The Broker, Playing for Pizza, The Appeal, Calico Joe, The Racketeer, Gray Mountain, Rogue Lawyer, The Confession, The Litigators, The Whistler, Camino Island, The Rooster Bar, and the Theodore Boone series. Several of his novels were adapted into films including The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Chamber, A Painted House, The Runaway Jury, and Skipping Christmas.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The opening chapters detailing an elaborate scheme to steal five F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts from Princeton are the best part of this thriller from bestseller Grisham (The Whistler). A sophisticated gang pulls off the theft after faking a campus shooting that causes widespread panic. The university's insurance company, liable for millions, reaches out to unemployed academic and struggling writer Mercer Mann, who has just lost her position at the University of North Carolina and is in desperate financial straits. Mercer grew up spending summers on Florida's Camino Island, where Donna Watson, the shadowy insurance company representative, believes the stolen manuscripts are; she thinks they're in the possession of Bruce Cable, who runs a successful independent bookstore there. Despite Mercer's initial misgivings about functioning as a spy, she agrees to return to Camino Island and insinuate herself into its literary community as a precursor to gaining Bruce's confidence-and determining whether he has the stolen goods. But after this promising setup, the plot follows predictable lines to a conclusion that genre fans have seen before. Author tour. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Company. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A light caper turns into a multilayered game of cat and mouse in a story that, as with most of Grisham's (The Whistler, 2016, etc.) crime yarns, never gets too complex or deep but is entertaining all the same.Bruce Cable is a bon vivant-ish owner of a bookstore specializing in rarities, which ought to mean he's covered in dust instead of Florida sunshine. But he's an aging golden boy, the perfect draw for young aspiring novelist and cute thing Mercer Mann, who's attracted to books and Bruce and the literary scene he's created on formerly sleepy Camino Island. It takes us a while to get to the smooth-operating Bruce, though, because Grisham's first got to set up, with all due diligence, the misdeed to be attended to: the theft of F. Scott Fitzgerald's manuscripts from the Princeton library. Now, who wouldn't want the mojo associated with holding a piece of paper out of Fitzgerald's typewriter? Suspicion falls on Bruce, whereupon Mercer enters the picture, for a novel way has been presented to her to pay off some crushing student loans. (Always timely, Grisham is.) Eventually, Bruce and Mercer are reading between the lines and searching for clues between the sheets ("We're not talking about love; we're talking about sex," Grisham writes, with a perfectly correct semicolon). But was it Bruce who pulled off the literary crime of the century? Maybe, and maybe not; Grisham leaves us guessing even as he makes clear that literary criminals don't have to be nice guys in order to be good at their work: "He died a horrible death, Oscar, it was awful," one particularly menacing bookworm tells a quarry once the stolen manuscripts go missing a second time. "But before he died he gave me what I wanted. You." How all these little threads join up is a pleasure for Grisham fans to behold: there's nothing particularly surprising about it, but he's a skillful spinner of mayhem and payback. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Novelists who write novels about novelists often produce fine work, from literary fiction like Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys through thrillers (Donald E. Westlake's The Hook) and horror (Stephen King's Misery). And now John Grisham, who continues the quality run with this thoroughly entertaining thriller about a novelist who's recruited by a shadowy organization to infiltrate the inner circle of a rare-books dealer and find proof that he's in possession of F. Scott Fitzgerald's handwritten manuscripts, which, in the story, were recently stolen from Princeton University. As Mercer Mann, our hero, gets to know the captivating book dealer Bruce Cable, she runs the risk of falling under his spell and forgetting what she's supposed to be doing. Filled with lively supporting characters (most of whom are writers) and with insider knowledge of the book business, this offers a fascinating take on people who write novels for a living. And it has a genuinely suspenseful plot, too. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Approximate number of John Grisham books sold: 300 million.--Pitt, David Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MERCER MANN, a young novelist struggling to come up with an idea for her next book, is recruited by a shadowy company to locate five priceless F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts that have been stolen from the Firestone Library at Princeton. In John Grisham's latest thriller, the inspirationstarved Mercer spends a lot of time moaning about her lack of juicy subject matter, even as she runs down clues to the Fitzgerald theft and befriends a cunning rarebook dealer she suspects may be the crime's mastermind. About midway through, you may feel like tapping Grisham's heroine on the shoulder: "What do you mean, you can't think of a plot? Look around you! You're living in a dandy one!" The veteran suspense novelist is off on a happy lark with "Camino Island," a resorttown tale that reads as if Grisham is taking a vacation from writing John Grisham novels. Instead of hurtling readers down the dark corridors of the courthouses that dot his 20-plus legal thrillers, here he gently ushers us onto an island off the coast of Florida, a sleepy place whose town's social life is enlivened by a busy independent bookstore run by a garrulous peacock who has a different-colored seersucker suit for every day of the week. At Bay Books, Bruce Cable presides over book signings with authors on tour and regular dinners with local writers. But since his real money comes from trading in rare first editions, this makes him a suspect as a possible fence for the Fitzgerald manuscripts, the clever theft of which gets "Camino Island" off to its suspenseful start. Law enforcement goes after the thieves, but so does a mysterious private company that specializes in "security and investigations." Enter Mercer Mann and her thwarted second novel. A representative from the unnamed company taps her to get close to Bruce. Why does she agree? The company will write off her collegeloan debt as well as hand her a hefty paycheck. (As with so many thriller plots, it's best not to get bogged down in the plausibility of this setup.) Grisham is crafty in his construction. "Camino" begins with the theft, and the quick, precise portraits of the perpetrators lead you to assume this is going to be a caper novel. Then the focus switches to Mercer, and you start wondering how this innocent with writer's block is going to connect to the criminals. Cable, the colorful bookseller, is the glue that holds Grisham's plotting together. He's also a way for Grisham to have more fun than usual. "Camino Island" contains leisurely passages in which Cable gasses on entertainingly about collecting first editions by writers ranging from Virginia Woolf to J. D. Salinger to John D. MacDonald. Sometimes, though, Grisham gets a bit too relaxed, letting his dialogue become both simplistic and florid, as when Mercer, pondering Woolf, sighs sadly: "She killed herself. Why do writers suffer so much, Bruce? So much destructive behavior, even suicide." There are also repetitions: In these pages we encounter "seasoned thieves" and a "seasoned raconteur," and find Cable described as a "seasoned professional" when it comes to sex. That's a lot of seasoning. Yet these flaws don't impede the jolly appeal of the novel's storytelling. Grisham has said that he and his wife dreamed up "Camino Island" during a long car ride to Florida, and the book provides the pleasure of a leisurely jaunt periodically jolted into high gear, just for the fun and speed of it. ? KEN TUCKER is critic at large for Yahoo, and a music critic for NPR's "Fresh Air With Terry Gross."
Library Journal Review
A theft of priceless books from a library, a book dealer who dabbles in the black market of stolen manuscripts, and a novelist who is recruited for a daring mission all add up to what sounds like the ideal beach read. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.