Book #13: The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

This is one of the first John Grisham books I read maybe 8-10 years ago. I guess it has been a while since revisiting it, but I loved it as much as I did before. Honestly, you can't read too many John Grishams at once or else they all start to blend together. When I first discovered them, back in high school, I read five or six in a row--and I got TOTALLY sick of them. I knew exactly what was going to happen and I was done. But it's been so long since I've read any Grisham at all, so this felt fresh and it was fun to revisit Darby Shaw and the Pelican Brief.

The whole premise of the book is pretty amazing, and brilliant, in the most evil way possible. A guy pays to get two Supreme Court justices killed off so that a court case coming up the rounds will be decided in his favor. Nobody can figure it out, but Darby Shaw, a second-year law student at Tulane, does. She writes a brief about it and it makes its way up to the FBI--and when it does, people start getting killed left and right. Darby goes on the run, and most of the book tracks how she keeps herself alive by running from hotel room to hotel room and escaping from murder attempts. Eventually she makes contact with a reporter in DC who helps her to prove her theory and expose the bad guys. It's a pretty enthralling story, and isn't exactly mysterious as much as it is thrilling, like a James Bond movie or something.

I don't like how Grisham writes about women. I remember in some of his other books that he kind of objectifies them a bit, and just writes about how attractive any female characters are. That totally plays out in this book too--Darby is apparently the most attractive woman any of these people have ever seen, and everyone falls in love with her at first sight. Also, the romantic storyline of this book is pretty unbelievable and annoying too--why on earth would Darby even be thinking about getting interested in anyone else ten days after her lover is murdered in front of her eyes? She goes through a two-day mourning period and is then like, "I'm good." I don't know, it doesn't seem realistic. That's bothered me about this book every time. But otherwise, it's a good read and definitely a quick, fun one to distract you from real life for a while.