To Catch A Thief
Fans of John Grisham’s legal thrillers, would be surprised to pick up Camino Island, that has cops and criminals in plenty but not a lawyer in sight (at least not any important to the plot).
It is, instead a breezy crime-cum-romantic caper set on the fictitious Camino Island, where the Gatsby-esque Bruce Cable runs a book store and the town’s watering hole of choice. He wears colourful seersucker suits with bowties and lords it over the island’s community of writers and visiting authors conducting signing at his Bay Books store. He has also acquired a mansion, where some of the socializing and many seductions takes place.
His romance and co-habitation with antiques dealer Noelle is quickly established to come down to the business at hand. Five precious F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts are stolen from the well-guarded Princeton College’s Firestone Library. Two of the five thieves are immediately caught, but the rare manuscripts have disappeared.
An impoverished, out-of-work writer Mercer Mann is approached by the stylish Elaine from a shadowy security company hired by the insurers to trace the manuscripts. They believe Bruce might have acquired them—he is not all that scrupulous and is known to have dealt in stolen rare first editions. Mercer, who co-owns a cottage on Camino Island and spent her summers there in her childhood with her grandmother, has the perfect cover to worm herself into Bruce’s inner circle and try to find out if he has them.
If in the process she gets the inspiration to write the second novel she has been struggling with, as well as a touch of romance, so much the better for her.
The crime is not the Grisham’s main concern here, it’s creating a character like Bruce Cable and having fun with anecdotes about books and writers, at a time when so many book stores are closing down and there is a crisis in the world of publishing. Maybe some of Bruce Cable’s tactics to run a successful bookstore could be imitated?
Camino Island is a light read, perfect for curling up on a rainy day and finishing in one go.
Camino Island
By John Grisham
Publisher: Doubleday
Pages: 290
No comments:
Post a Comment