I haven’t read a book by John Grisham for many years, and my reading was mostly restricted to his legal thrillers (not being a fan of baseball, his other main focus), which I enjoyed quite a lot, particularly A Time to Kill and Runaway Jury. Honestly, when it comes to those kinds of books, he is as much of a screenwriter as a novelist, because they are so aptly suited for the visual medium. I have enjoyed both reading and watching them.

In recent years, it seems like he has been trying to expand his repertoire (or soften his image?) to include other kinds of fiction—A Painted House, Playing for Pizza, Skipping Christmas, and this one I just finished, Camino Island. I’m not sure that these efforts have been entirely successful; while these books have all been pleasant, interesting, and well written, they don’t seem to me to have the snap of his legal dramas.

This book is billed as a “heist” novel, but although the theft of five original manuscripts written by F. Scott Fitzgerald from Princeton University is detailed in the first part of the book, there isn’t much excitement surrounding it. The heist planning was interesting, but because it was all done undercover, so to speak, with distraction rather than direct action enabling the crew to pull it off, it wasn’t all that gripping.

Then there are not one but two abrupt shifts in the book—one to a bookstore owner and his history as a bookseller, and the other to a broke, blocked writer trying to figure out how she’s going to survive. These are initially confusing, until you realize that both these people are going to have some role in the further history of the heist.

Bruce Cable has a bookstore on Camino Island, in Florida, and the tracing of certain industry connections of his has led the insurance company to conclude that he may know something about the missing manuscripts that the company will be expected to pay out on if they aren’t located and returned to Princeton. The company hires an unnamed investigative entity who in turn hires Mercer Mann, a writer who had some success with her first novel, but is now blocked on her second and has just been let go from her teaching job. Mercer has ties to the island (her grandmother lived there and she visited every summer as a child), so the investigators feel it will seem natural for her to “infiltrate” by staying at her grandmother’s cottage, ostensibly to write, and inserting herself into the local literary scene at the bookstore. They hope that by doing so, she can discover whether there is any truth to the rumors about the manuscripts being linked to Bruce Cable.

I most enjoyed the evolution of the bookstore, with all the details involved; I hadn’t picked up this book specifically because it was about books and reading, but luck took me there, and I always like to hear about the set-up, philosophy, and day-to-day business practices of bookstores and their owners.

I least enjoyed the character Mercer (the young woman writer), who whined a lot about not being able to write but didn’t actually seem to be trying that hard amidst all her other distractions.

A little excitement comes back into the book when the FBI and the insurance company catch some of the thieves and it seems that Mercer’s rather flat-footed undercover work with Bruce Cable may actually lead to one or more of the stolen manuscripts being located. But the ending itself was rather a sterile wrap-up. I suppose everything was resolved adequately, but again, not particularly excitingly.

It was a pleasant read, but not a gripping one, and definitely not my favorite of Grisham’s.

I was somewhat embarrassed to discover that while I’ve been ignoring his recent adult works, I also apparently missed that he’s been writing a series for young teens about a 13-year-old lawyer, Theodore Boone. These sound like books I could promote to reluctant young male readers; I’ll have to read one and see!