Damning With Faint Praise

I fell in love with John Grisham when I read The Firm.  In 1991 I was living in Chicago, with two kids, a wonderful sitter, and time to indulge myself.  I knew lots of Big Law lawyers like John Grisham.  I was impressed that a partner at a fancy, downtown law firm had the time to write a best seller.  And he wrote some good ones.  

I enjoyed The Pelican Brief and A Time to Kill and The Rainmaker.  The Runaway Jury told the best of all of those stories, and that's saying something.  Each one of them is memorable, decades later.  The names of the characters have escaped me, but their escapades are still kicking around in my deeper memory banks.  

Things happened in those books.  There were surprises.  You had to pay attention because not everything was what it seemed.  

That was not the case with his latest oeuvre.  The Exchange is a sequel to The Firm.  It's about gathering money to ransom a kidnapped lawyer.  The title was kind of a spoiler.  

If I cared about any of the characters, I might have been as insulted as they were that phone calls weren't returned in a timely fashion, that national governments were reluctant to negotiate on the main character's terms, that Big Law partners were greedy. 

But Grisham never expands on any of them beyond where they live and how much money they have.  For those without money, their descriptions lie within their rung on the corporate ladder.  The kidnapped woman cries a few times.  Her sick father is hospitalized a few times.  Told from a distance, that's about as emotional as the story gets.

When a serious bout of food poisoning - the who/why/how of which was a tantalizing storyline left disappointingly unexplored - is the most action packed sequence in the book, you can bet there is trouble ahead.  The kidnappers were never identified  Absolutely nothing unexpected happened, and what did happen was boring.

Flying on private planes sounds like fun.  Five star hotels and limousines and friends with secluded island retreats who would just love to have your twin boys and your in-laws drop in for a few weeks to hide from dangerous bad guys sounds like fun.  

It's too bad the book is no fun at all. 

I wish the words lived up to the quality of the paper they were printed on.  It was a pleasure to turn the pages; they were thick and the perfect shade of white and made a satisfying sound when grasped. 

It's pretty sad when the physical book outshines the content.  I can't recommend this one at all.