Entertaining but vaguely dissatisfying, 24 April 2002

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