AudioBooksReview: John Grisham

Showing posts with label John Grisham. Show all posts

The Rooster Bar by John Grisham

read by Ari Fliakos

Grisham is a long-time favourite of AudioBooksReview. He has the enviable talent of whetting the appetite, getting the juices flowing and then delivering something arguably unsubstantial but generally satisfying to consume and mull over in retrospect.

Characterisation might be a little thin (two of the protagonists of The Rooster Bar, Mark Frazier and Todd Lucero, are at times indistinguishable: something perhaps substantiated by the bedmate they share, prosecutor Hadley Caviness), but the story carries you along and, well, you just have to know how it all ends up. So many books fail in their initial hooks and there are a fair few that, despite rewinding and restarting, your reviewer has never heard further than the opening twenty minutes.

The Rooster Bar fulfils the Grisham promise.

Inspired by an article in American magazine The Atlantic, Grisham’s new book examines the for-profit legal education industry. These new establishments, deemed educational and named ‘universities’, are part of a criminal cohort now plying their cynical trade in England too. In England, annual fees of just under £10,000 are charged by former polytechnics and greedy new colleges, just like older varsities, but which cannot be said to offer anything like a comparable education or qualification.

In The Rooster Bar, Mark Frazier, Todd Lucero and Zola Maal are third-year law students, deep in debt, facing their final term at Foggy Bottom Law School in Washington, DC: a prestigious location, but more dedicated to profit than to learning. Friend and classmate Gordy Tanner has convinced himself of the educational conspiracy whereby law schools admit unqualified students so as to profit from their student loans. Moreover, Foggy Bottom’s owner, a Wall Street lawyer, also has links to one of the banks that specialises in lending to students. Gordy’s discovery tips the balance of his frayed nerves and he jumps off the Arlington Memorial Bridge.

The students, routinely harassed by the banks lending them the money to study, and troubled by their friend’s suicide, eventually decide that enough is enough. They drop out of classes, assume new identities and, with the Rooster Bar as their business address, trawl the lower courts, ambulance chasing, picking up desperate clients for traffic violations and the like so they can practise law without a licence – a felony, they reassure themselves, rather than a misdemeanour, but lucrative work and they are learning law on the job, so to speak.

Of course, it all goes right until it doesn’t, with a few unhappy clients and their own creditors starting to close in. A class action, with thousands of complainants who apparently don’t need to be verified to share in a multi-million dollar out-of-court settlement, is the climactic clincher: debts wiped out, money in the bank (lots), early retirement in a warm place with new identities. What could go wrong?

Grisham’s simple morality tales of Davids and Goliaths rarely fail to satisfy. The protagonists might be a trifle two dimensional, but the yarns are entertaining yarns and feed the imagination with plenty of the magical ‘what ifs’ of popular fiction.

Can’t wait for next year’s.

* * * *

Buy The Rooster Bar

Gray Mountain by John Grisham

read by Catherine Taber

Grisham must have been writing on autopilot this year. Or perhaps he has put the franchise out to the highest bidder (as apparently some blockbuster names now do), and just not bothered to read the results, because Gray Mountain simply will not do.

Once again we have the plucky rookie lawyer opposing Corporate Big Law, which this time is propping up good old American market forces capitalism in the form of the heartless coal industry – wilfully ruining the environment, callously destroying communities and families, and ruthlessly cheating, murdering, exploiting and enslaving. Grisham’s knight in shining armour (or should that be ‘armor’) coming to the rescue here is Samantha Kofer – progeny, you won’t be surprised, of successful and wealthy, but divorced, DC lawyers – who is living the sweet life of a third-year associate at one of New York’s largest law firms, and hating it.

Needless to say, having been ‘cardboard-boxed’ in the aftermath of the Leman Brothers bankruptcy and forced to take an unpaid position in the Appalachian Mountains, she decides, after an unavoidable fling with the brave, handsome and tenacious local lawyer, to eschew the offer of status and riches in a start-up City law firm (phoenixed, somehow, from the ashes of US banking fraud), and stay on in Hillbilly country to save Gray Mountain, fight the good fight and right every wrong.

Catherine Taber gives it her best, but the pace is slow, the characters two-dimensional, the dialogue flat and the suspense criminally lacking.

Not one of Grisham’s best, although that probably won’t stop it filling many a Christmas stocking at the end of the year.

Buy Gray Mountain

Theodore Boone: The Abduction by John Grisham

read by Richard Thomas

When Theodore Boone, the first novel to feature Grisham’s young would-be lawyer, appeared, it was met with almost universal delight. Grisham had created a feisty and interesting character with what seemed to be terrific potential for a series of novels that would satisfy young and old alike. And might even encourage the print-phobic adolescent to turn a few pages for a change. As an audiobook for families to share, Grisham seemed to be on to a winner, and the book confirmed his reputation as a great storyteller who could match character and human interest with pace and plot.

So it is a great disappointment to reveal that the follow-up, Theodore Boone: The Abduction, is not up to scratch. In truth, it is what is commonly termed ‘a turkey’.

Theo’s best friend April disappears from her bedroom in the middle of the night and no one, especially the local police, seems to have the slightest idea what to do to find her. Theo knows that she was home on her own the night she disappeared since her dippy hippy mother had failed to return for a few days and her rock star wannabe dad, as usual, was living his life elsewhere. But we are given all these facts at least three times in as many chapters as the story stalls and goes nowhere. And that is virtually all the story there is. We do have a minor red herring of a distant cousin pen pal, recently released from jail, who happens to turn up in the area and who starts to milk the girl’s disappearance to his own advantage. But Theo’s supposed legal expertise isn't exploited in the least, unless you include a completely irrelevant outing, again, to Animal Court, which was so entertaining in the first story, but which here is simply filler.

Slow, unexciting and predictable, this would not have been published if it didn’t have Grisham's name on the cover. Let’s hope he isn't franchising his name like some authors we could mention and failed to check what had been put out under his famous brand.

A third outing is due out later this year. For Theo’s sake, do better this time John or you will fast start to lose your considerable and lucrative following.

Buy Theodore Boone: The Abduction