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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining but vaguely dissatisfying, 24 April 2002
By A Customer
This was my first John Grisham novel, and while it won't deter me from reading any of his other works, I'm not exactly going to be jumping on his bandwagon either. The premise of the story is simple enough. A brilliant young legal student writes her own theory about who murdered two Supreme Court judges and why. What she doesn't realise is that her theories are actually bang on target, and before long, the bad guys are out to get her. For the first two thirds of the novel, I couldn't put it down. It was a bona fide page turner, but as more and more of the story unfolded, I couldn't help but feel that Grisham was somehow cheating me out of a better novel. The vast majority of the characters we meet in the book have already read the contents of Darby's brief, but Grisham decides to leave the reader completely in the dark until the last act. It reeks of convenient plot device : here we have twenty odd characters wandering around with full knowledge of The Brief, and not one of them feels the need to talk about its contents, just so Darby can have her big Narrative Moment several hundred pages into the book. I haven't seen the film, but it doesn't take much thinking to know how Julia Roberts must have played it! And it's pretty much downhill from there. With the big mystery out of the way, the novel devolves into the usual scenarios. Will the bad guys find Darby ? Will she expose the villains ? Will she survive ? It doesn't take a genius to work it out, and the continual cat-and-mouse chases are fairly standard, been-there-done-that, thriller fare. The last hundred or so pages of the novel are padded out beyond belief. I kept waiting for something more to happen, and when it didn't, I wondered why Grisham didn't just wrap them up into one small chapter. My only other major complaint is that the 'twist' at the end of the book about who were and were not the bad guys is laughable, and added nothing whatsoever to the story. If I could sum this book up in one phrase it would be 'ho-hum, where's my next book?' Not dreadful, but not exactly the highlight of my reading career either.
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