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.