I don’t know if this was true for you, but my childhood home was absolutely dominated by John Grisham. It sort of went through my home like the flu with probably my oldest sister bringing home a copy of The Firm or maybe A Time to Kill…one of those two, but eventually others. Everyone, including my mom and brother (both big readers) and my dad (not a big reader), passing the books around. My brother was not allowed to read A Time to Kill because of the violence in it (he did, don’t worry), and I wasn’t allowed to read any of them, and I didn’t. But now I have.
And now that I have read a John Grisham novel, I can firmly say….I have read a John Grisham novel.
So here’s what I will say….this is a very well plotted novel and the pacing is pretty good throughout, especially for a 500 page novel. It gets weird toward the end where in one half of the narrative the pace is lightning fast, but in the other half, it’s regular, and I don’t think the novel balances that out as well as it could.
But if you haven’t read or seen this and don’t know what it’s about: Mitch is a hotshot law student, about the graduate, sitting on several offers from around the country. He’s brought in to interview with an unheard of tax firm in Memphis, TN who gives him a great offer that includes a house, a car, stock, a guaranteed partnership after ten years, for a firm with zero turnover. Except! The turnover might be (it is) murder!
So it goes from there.
I was actually pretty hooked until the big reveal, which was just really disappointing. I think I’ve been spoiled by Dan Brown, who can really cook up a conspiracy.
Anyway, the prose is this novel is absolutely laughably bad. It’s like someone told Grisham that he needed to provided unnecessary and distracting details about every character in the book. This isn’t the kinds of background building you get for every random character in a Stephen King novel…no, this is like…”The waitress had a limp.” And then the waitress doesn’t say anything or do anything.
Also, one time he writes something like “Mr. [Bad Guy] looked down at the file and smiled evilly.”
Also there’s a lot…a LOT of casual racism in the novel…not from the characters (there’s still plenty — but I allow for characters to be racist, because people are racist and let that just be part of building a realistic world in books)…but the narrator…the straight-forward third person narrator. So on the very first page we get our first of many references to “Blacks”….but the worst moment is when talking about how the KFC on the Cayman Islands wasn’t very good…the narrator, for now real reason, discusses how weird it is that the cooks, being Black, couldn’t work out how to make good fried chicken.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Firm-Novel-John-Grisham/dp/0440245923/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1556065448&sr=8-2)