: The Summons
Author: John Grisham
I found this book fascinating. Not because the book’s that great, but because Grisham’s best-selling gimmick is so obvious. Grisham’s appeal is that he writes about a subject almost everyone’s interested in: money. (No reader actually cares about lawyers or the law.) In this book, the “plot” is about a law professor whose judge father dies. There’s supposedly little money in the estate, but when the son arrives at home, he finds $3 million in cash hidden in a cabinet. The question then becomes, “Where did the money come from?” Grisham throws in baddies who also want the money, so the law professor’s on the run with the cash in the trunk of his Audi, and it’s an entertaining read. But of course the real appeal is the juicy fantasy of finding $3 million in cash. We all want to be in those shoes! There are some illogical aspects to the plot, and the story, while interesting, takes too long to get to the mediocre payoff, but the ending is cool: without giving anything away, the tables are turned and the law professor’s greed is laid bare. I’d give this a solid B, in comparison to Grisham’s other works. He does a lot without much, and that’s an achievement. But this book says more about his readers than it does the author.
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