"Camino Island" - a reader's blog Chapters 6, 7, 8 and epilogue

It's wrapped up in bow. By the end no one is doing anything different than you would guess. That, of course, is characteristic of the traditional form of this genre. I just wish getting there had been a bit messier.

I am guessing that "Camino Island" will not be a Grisham classic. Even his admirers have to admit that there is some lazy writing here. At one point the narrator describes with some disdain modern writing that uses unfamiliar words and no quotation marks. Later, one of the main characters also expresses this same point of view.  When you read it the second time, you begin to lose the illusion and along with it your trust in the writer. It's the writer's job to keep the theater darkened. Also, I wish his characters would stop "easing" everywhere they go and instead move with a bit more purpose and personality.

By the way, don't take legal advice from this book.  It is not accurate that you cannot record a conversation without the other person's permission. In some states as long as all participants in a conversation are within a state a state you can and you use certain methods, you can. Kinda hate that a lawyer gets this wrong.

Final pet peeve: It is funny that the novel frowns upon prologues but carries an epilogue since they are both cheating features authors use to say what often should have been said in the body of the book. In this case the epilogue is equivalent to everyone standing around in the  final   "Columbo" scene letting the criminal explain what he did.  Again, that is common in the thriller/detective genre. So it is not a problem, unless you find commonness a problem. (Which I do.)

I read the book quickly and will remember what happened in it as long as I remember that I read it. Not sure that I will. In this way I suspect  Grisham fits well into the American diet of fluff and "Next!". That's ok. And that sells books. 300 million of them.