Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Obviously, no editor at Doubleday had the balls to tell their mega-author that the company does not publish unfinished manuscripts. Clearly, the guaranteed millions and the sound of ca-ching at the cash registers overcame any scruples about serving their readers’ interests. Thus, there is John Grisham’s 29th novel, Gray Mountain, to consider. Samantha Kofer, a twenty-something attorney, gets bounced from her success tracked, but mind-numbing, job at a huge Manhattan law firm by the Lehman crash. She finds herself cast out to backwoods Appalachia working as an unpaid intern for a legal services firm. For a full half of the book the author relates her introduction to real people and real law. If there’s a plot beyond this life lesson, the reader can’t divine it. Then on page 209 a chapter ends with, “On November 24, three days before Thanksgiving, they found him dead.” Let the story begin. The reader can assume Grisham has spent half his book setting the scene and putting the necessary characters in place. The dead man, Donovan Gray, is a victim of aviation sabotage. He was the knight-errant in battles with Big Coal and their corrupt lawyers. They screw everybody. He fights back. The good guys have Samantha’s dad, a disbarred lawyer with decades of experience suing airlines over crashes. Nothing aviation gets past him. He even provides venture cash for small lawyers to sue deep pocket opponents. The bad guys enlist the corrupted FBI to do their bidding, but the good guys have Samantha’s mother, a well placed official in the Justice Department. Everything seems to revolve around another Grisham document caper. Stolen documents that can prove crimes committed by the coal company are now in the possession of the recently murdered, Quixote-like lawyer’s “firm.” The “firm” now means his non-lawyer brother Jeff. The coal company has spies, operatives, wiretaps, and the FBI searching for the documents, but Jeff grew up locally and knows every trail and hidey-hole in the mountains, and he knows enough to use prepaid cell phones. Mysterious snipers, the eccoterrorists, are shooting out hundreds of $18,000 coal truck tires. Samantha has serial romantic interests in the brothers, but Donovan has a conveniently separated and distant wife. He also has a young daughter ominously named Haley. Donovan seems to have won a three million dollar settlement from a strip mining company, while Samantha struggles to recoup a few thousand dollars of docked wages for a client. Grisham even gives us Romey, a retarded hillbilly who likes to play police officer. He is perfectly set up to reappear as a deus-ex-machina to foil the bad guys as they approach the climactic scene. Sadly, the comet Romey’s period is too long for reappearance in this story. That’s not a problem, however, as this story has no climactic moment. Nevertheless, at this point the scene seems set for a terrific thriller. Surprise, the thrills never happen. The story really is only about Samantha’s dilemma choosing between resuming her former sex-in-the-city lifestyle and what she’s learned at her new firm, “We don’t work by the hour, but by the client.” The problem is Grisham gives the reader no reason whatsoever to have sympathy for Samantha or her problems. A simple story like this might be done well by Sarah Jewett or Louis Hémons, but Grisham is not up to the task. Hémon’s tale about Maria Chapdelaine’s choice between the backwoods and Boston’s glitter put her at the apex of Canadian literature. With Samantha Kofer the tension seems to revolve around whether she will get laid (again?) or ever have another martini? The story ends with the brother going off to Montana for no stated reason, the mom and dad never enter the plot with their expertise, the FBI slinks away, the document problem has an inane non-resolution, Donovan’s murder is forgotten unsolved, fatherless Haley never appears, the three million dollars is left in appeals, the coal company’s criminal lawyers just keep screwing people untouched by justice or vengeance, eccoterrorism persists unsolved, but Samantha wins her employment case and a whopping $10,000 judgment for her client. This is important because it seems to be the motivation for her life-changing decision (and denouement of the book) not to take a perfect position back in New York, but instead stay at Mountain Legal Aid and clear up her clients’ problems. Amazingly, in the final scene she actually decides not to renounce, but postpone, her return to her previous Manhattan lifestyle and employment until she finishes “three things” at Mountain Legal Aid Clinic. Mountain Legal ends her internship and agrees to pay her $39,000 per annum. End of story. Samantha Kofer will fade out of literature quickly because her author never sparked her with character or humanity. John Grisham owes his readers an end to the story he laid out so carefully in the background of Samantha Kofer’s enlightenment journey. While this book is well written and has no typos, there’s little else to say for Doubleday’s latest, and feeble, Grisham.