Publishers Weekly
04/20/2020
The murder of popular thriller writer Nelson Kerr during a hurricane drives bestseller Grisham’s exciting follow-up to 2017’s Camino Island. In the hurricane’s aftermath, the Camino Island police are too preoccupied to handle the case competently, so Nelson’s bookseller friend, Bruce Cable, the endearing though roguish leader of the Florida resort island’s literary society, and his pals—ex-con crime writer J. Andrew Cobb and bookstore intern Nick Sutton—obtain permission from Nelson’s relatives to investigate. The discovery of Nelson’s unpublished final novel, concerning Medicare fraud, conceivably holds the key to his death. Believing the manuscript is fact posing as fiction, Bruce retains the services of a dodgy security firm to infiltrate nursing homes. This effort leads to more murders, a cover-up, and a massive FBI operation to bring the book’s villains to justice. Grisham peoples the intriguing, elaborate plot with a winsome ensemble of distinguished authors and booklovers. Readers will hope to return soon to this appealing vacation hot spot. Agent: David Gernert, the Gernert Company. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
A cat-and-mouse caper . . . Grisham is an irresistible writer. His prose is fluent and gorgeous, and he has an ability to end each segment with a terse sentence thatn makes it all but impossible not to turn the page.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
JUNE 2020 - AudioFile
Listeners may be disappointed if they’re expecting this audiobook to be a tense legal drama. This second book in Grisham’s Camino Island series features bookstore owner and rare book dealer Bruce Cable and his author friends unraveling a murder mystery. However, we hear about most of the action secondhand. While narrator Michael Beck is well suited to portray Bruce and the other male characters, his voicings of female characters are not well done. As Bruce and friends ride out a hurricane hitting Camino Island, Florida, Beck’s narration captures the storm’s fury. The next morning finds Bruce’s friend, author Nelson Kerr, dead. As Bruce and crew go about solving the murder at a leisurely pace, taking almost a year, patient listeners will enjoy spending time with Grisham’s quirky characters. E.Q. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2020-03-29
A tempest is bearing down, and murder most foul is afoot in Grisham’s latest whodunit.
Call it a metamystery: Grisham, prolific producer of courtroom thrillers, moves the action to a Florida resort island populated by mystery writers. In the wake of a ravaging hurricane, one of them turns up dead—a nice, affable fellow named Nelson Kerr, a former trial lawyer who “ratted out a client, a defense contractor who was illegally selling high-tech military stuff to the Iranians and North Koreans.” It’s not hard to understand that the client might want Kerr dead. But then, so would others whom Kerr has written about, including money launderers and—well, let’s just say other entrepreneurs who wouldn’t like their activities to be described in any detail. Enter bookstore owner Bruce Cable, friend, drinking buddy, and sometime editor and adviser of Kerr and other members of Camino Island’s literary crowd, including “an ex-con who’d served time in a federal pen for sins that were still vague.” Cable is perhaps Grisham’s least sympathetic hero; he drinks night and day, sleeps around, and has few apparent scruples. At least he’s not a lawyer. Neither is he a cop, though he’s quicker on the scene than the island’s homicide investigator—“I didn’t know we had a homicide guy,” Bruce allows, since murder is rare in these parts. That leaves it to him, an intern, a girlfriend, and assorted other players to piece together what happened to the unfortunate Mr. Kerr, who, it must be said, is dispatched in a way nicely in keeping with Floridian lifestyles. Grisham’s tale unfolds at a leisurely pace, never breaking into a sweat, and if the bad guys seem a touch too familiar, the rest of the cast make a varied and believable lot, and some might even be fun to ride out a storm with, at least if they're unarmed.
A pleasure for Grisham fans and an undemanding addition to the beach bag.