Pages Don’t Turn as Fast as They Should in John Grisham’s “Camino Island”

I once had a creative writing professor in college who brought up John Grisham. He said he read his 2009 short story collection “Ford Country”, and to his surprise, Grisham can write. I felt the same way when I read Grisham’s 2012 novel “Calico Joe”, a solid drama about a father and son through the lens of the game of baseball. Now John Grisham has once again returned to writing something besides legal thrillers with the 2017 novel “Camino Island”. This novel isn’t bad but feels a bit bogged down. It’s not even really a long novel. It’s only 290 pages. The story starts off with a heist at Yale, where a group of thieves who stage a fake school shooting. It’s just them throwing some smoke bombs while they rob a bunch of rare manuscripts. The manuscripts are Fitzgerald novels. After they go on the run, a private investigation company decides to make an offer to a young thirty something women named Mercer Mann a job. She is a professor with one published novel under her belt, and way past her dateline for her second novel by years so she does need money and she seems like a good candidate for this job.

                They have proof that the manuscripts are being held by a rare bookdealer named Bruce Cable in his rare bookstore on Camino Island in Florida. She isn’t exactly excited about working for a company which violated her privacy, but between her student loans and her recent loss of her teaching job, the money is too good to pass up. Plus, she spent much of her childhood on the island, so she already knows the area well. The book dives a lot into Mercer’s childhood, and at times, seems a bit unfocused. While it’s good character development, the novel also has scenes that take away from the main mystery including Mercer stopping at the hospital to visit her mentally ill mother, and flashbacks to her childhood which are not well set up.

                I get Mercer’s problem, as she has trouble finishing her second book. If I had a dime for every writing project I have had trouble finishing, I would be a millionaire and feel less of a need to finish the writing project. However, Mercer does have a book under her belt already. She seems like she writes pretentious literary novels, and not the type of novels that sell like, well, John Grisham novels. While on the island, she meets other authors who happen to be a part of the literary community. For a small island, there seems to be an unusual number of authors who live near each other plus one of the nation’s best used bookstores. I can’t tell if this place is heaven or hell. Maybe a bit of both? Anyway, she is told nearby is a lesbian couple, one who writes romance novels and sold a ton of copies, with her wife, a woman who writes depressing literary novels that do not sell as nearly as much. When she meets the quirky couple, they decide to throw a dinner party in her honor, because well, there’s weirdly a lot of writers on this island.

                She meets a mystery writer, more literary writers, and a Stephanie Meyer like vampire writer at the party. There’s a ton of inside baseball in this book about being an author, which can either be fun if you care about that stuff or boring if you don’t care. Sometimes inside baseball can be fun, but it needs to be a broader topic. I don’t want to judge Grisham readers, but most of them probably don’t care about the world of agents and genres of books they are writing. Anyway, the mystery starts to pick up and we get to know about Bruch Cable.

                He’s married to a French woman who writes how to books on decoration, and they have an open marriage. Cable obviously wants to sleep with Mercer, who is young and attractive. He is older than her, but that doesn’t seem to stop him. There’s also some interest from a thriller writer on the island who’s a bit of an alcoholic. He also is older than her, but that might had been an interesting couple for the story. However, they never really develop that part of the story. It’s dropped after like a scene. This book seems a bit too short, and the ending a bit too abrupt. However, it’s not a bad book. It’s just not one of Grisham’s best. I was a bit interested in the inside writing baseball talk, but I also really like books. I also enjoyed the dive into the world of rare book dealers. I guess you might want to have some interest or at least be able to learn about that, but overall the book is just okay. In an odd way, this book might have benefited from being longer. There was a lot more to explain, and it seems like a few stories thrown together.

John Sandford’s “Bad Blood” Dives into The World of Cults and Abuse

Yes, I read another Virgil Flowers novel. I’m somewhat hooked on John Sandford novels. They are gritty, and fast paced and better written than James Patterson’s mysteries. “Bad Blood” came out in 2010 and the book went some places I didn’t see coming. The jacket just states simply that Virgil uncovers a family history that is shocking, but he ends up in the sketchy backdrop of a crazy religious sect rapt with child abuse. This novel is a nasty one. This book starts with a murder. A teenager is helping a farmer in an afterschool job, and next thing you knows, he crushes his skull in, killing him. Yet again, it’s up to Flowers to go the small Minnesota town with plenty of secrets. This time the town is Homestead, and as the book said, this one is a big case he can tell early on and he might be there awhile. It’s up to Virgil Flowers to solve the case, and this time, the book has something I complained about the last book lacking which is a bit of romance and a personal side. He quickly starts sleeping with the divorced, attractive female sheriff of the town named Lee Croaky. I guess Lee can be a girl’s name too. Even when he meets her, he sees what Sanford describes as a glint in her eye, and determines she’s divorced. Err, good detective work Flowers, I guess? I liked the relationship he had with the sheriff for many reasons. She too is smart, not super young and still sexy without being dumb.

                Anyway, the teen is named Jacob Flood, and the case just gets worst as Flood kills himself in prison. Well, things get even worst as Flowers discovers he was gay. He doesn’t hate gay people, but a small town in Minnesota, that could be more complicated. Virgil deducts he might have had a relationship with a grown man named Jim Crocker, who is divorced from a woman. When he goes to question him, he discovers he had killed himself. Then he discovers years ago a teen girl working at the Dairy Queen was murdered. She was friends with Flood. Things get more and more connected, but how? Virgil wonders. Well, it ends up they are all members of a local church which is more like a cult than a mainstream religion even it too draws from the Bible. Sandford makes it well known later in the book he isn’t anti religion per say, as Flowers believes in God, his dad was a minister, and he visits a very nice minister at the local Lutheran church.

                Well, that’s where this book gets nasty. The church appears to be a cover for a child abuse ring which might even go back hundreds of years. Sandford novels can be gritty at times, and this is no exception. Some of the evidence they find is graphic with child abuse. Sandford doesn’t really skirt on that, nor should he. This is a crime novel. The church is weird, and so are the people in it who constantly reject the world of law for the world of the Bible. It’s not that unusual for religion fanatics. The only real problem I had with this book is the last couple chapters including a very weird scene where the women and girls of the church decide to try to make up their own court type of scene. Virgil is trying to get them to go through normal police protocol, but they want to do the punishing themselves. In some ways, that makes sense. Fringe religious people can be distrusting of the normal world, yet it also doesn’t make sense because they want to escape. Virgil even needs to track down a woman who ran away from the church and was never seen in town again.

                I guess I’m a bit hooked on these page turners of John Sandford. While it’s not the greatest literature ever, it isn’t half bad. Even Stephen King gives these books good blurbs. His books aren’t total throw away novels like a James Patterson novel. You can tell there is some effort put into the novel with their twists, turns and likable heroes. However, I wouldn’t suggest these books for the weak of heart. Sandford doesn’t skim on some of the nasty details, and due to the child abuse evidence, this was the nastiest of the Sandford novels I have read yet.

                However, I suggest his books for people who really love mysteries and crime. Chances are, I’ll read another book by him in the future. This book did make me think a bit more than his last one. This one made me think about how people can use religion and rejection of modern society to control people and abuse those who can’t fight back. I’m not sure if that was Sandford’s intention or he simply wanted to write another good page turner. I think he probably wanted to write another good page turner, but that’s the way it goes with these kinds of books. I like Virgil Flowers, and he seem like a good guy to get a beer with. The best thing about this book was seeing a bit more of a personal side to him, as Sandford novels can sometimes be too focused on the mystery side.