As reviewing everything that comes along is part of the territory, critics are steeped in mediocrity. We wonder why the publishers accept the manuscripts and turn them into books. Perhaps because they think critics are perverse enough to like them, the public following our advice. Whereupon money is paid for them.
The Litigators by John Grisham 385pp, Hodder & Stoughton hardcover. Available at Asia Books and leading bookshops, 795 baht
This reasoning isn't altogether delusional. Critics seldom agree and more than a few are perverse _ calling what is good, bad, and what is bad, good. However the majority of critics, myself included, know the difference between good and bad, our rating accordingly. When a good, really good book comes along, we praise it to the skies.
Some authors are better than others, yet not always consistently. Still, when in top form they rightfully earn laurels. Take John Grisham, the foremost author of courtroom thrillers, not only in the US but the world over. If he stays within his field he's unexcelled, but when he strays out of it, he isn't.
Happily the latest of his nearly 30 works, The Litigators, is entirely about lawyers, set in Chicago. He makes the point and keeps reiterating it, that America in general and Chicago in particular, has a surfeit of lawyers. So many that they engage in cutthroat competition to get clients.
They are ambulance chasers, avid readers of obituaries, visit emergency wards of hospitals, lie outrageously in their advertisements. Barely surviving handling divorces and accidents, they all dream of the big score, a suit against a major company, with millions of dollars in fees.
Grisham has us believe that the protagonists David Zina, a Harvard Law School graduate, hates the firm of 600 lawyers he's working, personally earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. He walks out and joins the bottom of the food chain firm Finley & Fugg, run by Oscar and Wally, Rochelle the office manager.
The dream case is the suing of a major pharmaceutical company with a heart drug on the market. Suffice to say that their legal team and expert witnesses wipe up the floor with David. Subsequently he manages to win a big case against a company selling (poisonous) toys from China.
The Litigators ranks with Grisham's very best. Whether or not you are one of his multitude fans, don't pass it by.
The Jefferson Key by Steve Berry 480pp, 2011 Hodder paperback. Available at Asia Books and leading bookshops, 350 baht
Privateers ahoy
There were pirates/buccaneers/corsairs and there were privateers _ licensed pirates. Thieves and murderers the lot. What set them apart is that pirates kept all they stole on the high seas and were hunted down and executed by naval vessels, while privateers gave 20% of the swag to their government. For which they were allowed to get away with it.
For the record Sir Francis Drake was a privateer, knighted for filling Queen Elizabeth I's coffers. According to Steve Berry's The Jefferson Key, privateers licensed by George Washington destroyed a good deal of British shipping and were instrumental in the 13 colonies gaining their independence.
Here, the author focuses on four privateers on the eastern seaboard of the US, who banded together _ the Commonwealth.
Wealthy, running successful business, their centuries old licenses in perpetuity, legitimate under the US Constitution, they refuse to be dissolved.
Nor to give their nefarious activities for which, according to their licensed, they are immune from prosecution. For the most part, the successive presidents let them be. But now and again the occupant of the White House put his foot down. The four members and their offspring had a way of dealing with that: assassination.
Berry endeavours to blame the assassination of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and JFK on the Commonwealth. Unsuccessful attempts against Jackson and Reagan, too. Through psychological and bribery, the four got others to do their dirty work for them. And they had a hitman _ the quartermaster _ on the payroll.
No evidence linking the Commonwealth to the assassinations, current president Danny Daniels directs the intelligence community to get on the ball. The head of one such agency is being paid a fortune as a secret Commonwealth spy. Hundreds of pages are spent in their cat-and-mouse game.
Taking a leaf from Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, there's a search for the meaning of a message Thomas Jefferson encrypted. Chapters are devoted to a description of Monticello, the third president's home. There are abductions, torture, killings. The penultimate chapter climax is aboard a sloop off Chesapeake Bay.
Featuring Cotton Malone, the author's literary creation, as the protagonist The Jefferson Key is exciting, not persuasive.
