JOHN GRISHAM'S CAMINO WINDS

Camino Winds has a selling point which neither author nor publisher could have expected. With coronavirus sweeping through care homes, killing many who are, at least in the UK, slow to be added to the pandemic death tolls, John Grisham's second book set on Camino Island, in the wake of being hit by Hurricane Leo, takes a change of direction as abrupt and unexpected as Leo's own capricious path of destruction, into a chilling tale of abuse within American care homes, exploited for huge profit.

It is a story of two halves. Grisham brings us back to the Florida island and book-store owner and sometimes gray-area rare-books dealer Bruce Cable, again surrounded by his 'gang' of writers and poetasting literati. The first half builds up following the path of Leo as it approaches (his anthropomorphic descriptions of Leo are effectively suspenseful) and then hits the island, leaving behind the dead body of one of the 'gang', novelist Nelson Kerr, apparently felled by a tree branch ton loose in the winds. But led by college student and part-time bookstore employee Nick, who has read every crime novel ever published, Cable and Crew soon establish it's a murder, not an accident at all.

So far so good: it looks like it is going to be a locked-island mystery: virtually everyone evacuated with Leo approaching, which would limit your suspects nicely, and the sleepy local police slow and unwilling to react to it as a homicide. Except another of the 'gang', crime novelist and ex-con Bob, appears to have come into exceedingly close contact with the likely killer, a contract pro who is just as likely long gone from the locked room.

And here the story switches gears for the second half, into a medical conspiracy thriller, something like Michael Crichton or Robin Cook. Because Nelson Kerr's novels exposed corporate crime, and it seems he knew that nursing homes are using a dangerous drug to prolong the lives of non-responsive patients, in order to keep collecting fees for their care from the government.

The previous novel, Camino Island, also switched gears mid-way, starting as a heist novel, then becoming a sort of cat and mouse love story, part caper thriller and part education of the young would-be writer Mercer Mann. The switch worked in part because the story became more personal, and its overall success depended on just how much you cared about the relationship between Cable (in an open marriage with his French wife, who spends the summers in France with her lover) and Mann, one in which he educates her in the book business, writing and crime, as well as love.

Camino Winds reverses the order, and this is where the problem lies, because the story become less personal in its second half, especially because Grisham's strong point is page-turning plot, not characterisation. Mann comes back, on the final leg of a book tour for her wildly successful novel, with her new man in tow, and appears once or twice to provide incidental conveniences for the plot. She is much less interesting with her new distance from Bruce, and really, there is no other character to take her place. Apart from a couple of minimum wage employees in Kentucky nursing homes, who are draw rather well, few of the characters exhibit much if any character, and it's hard to tell their lines apart, much less visualise them. They don't require much depth, but in a series you would expect to be able to recognise recurring characters. Even the biggest emotional moment for Bruce, a big decision to be made with his wife Noelle, is passed by almost incidentally, and Noelle doesn't get much to say.

The mechanics of this medical conspiracy are intriguing, and the plot clicks. It's a nice twist to see the firm that tried to out-fox Cable in the first book brought back on his side (at what seems a ridiculous bargain rate, given the expenses they seem to incur and the big prize that's there to be won) but you long for the two women running the show to be fleshed out, at least for Bruce's sake. It's as if, having committed himself to Noelle, women cease to exist. Which makes you wonder why Mercer's name is Mann. And there's a very gratuitous plot twist involving two hit people who suddenly both fail at their jobs.

In the end, however, the emotional power is just missing. Grisham at best is a utilitarian writer, but here the prose is sloppy to the point of distraction. The 'gang', which seems a rather adolescent way to describe this group, are reintroduced more than once, though the descriptions remain the same, and unenlightening. The crux of Kerr's new novel, for which he is killed, is summarized three times, once for someone who's supposed to have read it. Other details come up as if for the first time, even when they've been previously explained. So by the time the gears all click into the place, the question of whether or not Kerr's work will be finished is all we are left with, and somehow it does not seem enough.

Camino Winds by John Grisham

Hodder & Stoughton, £20, ISBN 9781529342451

Note: this review appeared first at Shots: 
http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/book_reviews_view.aspx?BOOK_REVIEW_ID=2463

ROBERT LITTELL & RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON: VICIOUS CIRCLE AND EXILE

 This was my American Eye column (or in this case, Middle Eastern Eye) for Shots magazine number 10.

The link that once led to it leads now to nothing but an error message, so I've reprinted it here: 

THE WAR WITH NO PEACE 

It's unlikely there's a more intractable geo-political problem, at least on this planet, than that of Israel and Palestine. Not only is it a tragedy of epic proportions within its own lands, but it is a root motivator of much of the extremism that sees itself transformed into terror around the world. It is a conflict which forces the United States government into positions that may flow contrary to its overall best interests, and sometimes contradict much of its stated foreign policy goals. It is also such a tinder box issue in America that it takes a certain amount of courage simply to approach it in a balanced way.

It is surprising how few writers who operate in the espionage genre have delved into the issue itself, which is why two recent novels by very different sorts of novelists are so fascinating to compare. Actually, that one of those two should be Robert Littell is no surprise at all. Littell is one of America's very best spy novelists: one of the first to be compared to both John LeCarre (when he wrote The Defection Of AJ Lewinter) and to Norman Mailer (with his massive CIA novel The Company). If there is a big three of American espionage, Littell would have to be there along with Charles McCarry and Alan Furst (and Furst, thus far, has dealt exclusively in the past). Vicious Circle is a novel firmly grounded in the world of intelligence, with its focus on the hunt for an American-born fundamentalist rabbi and leader of the settlement movement, who is kidnapped and held for ransom by a legendary Palestinian assassin.

Richard North Patterson, on the other hand, is best-known as a writer of legal thrillers, though

following the course of his career, his best work has usually been done on the political side; I once said he's much closer to writers like Allan Drury (Advice and Consent) than to, say, John Grisham or Scott Turow, with whom he's more usually compared. So with that interest in politics, it's not shocking that he chooses the Arab-Israeli conflict as the basis for a thriller, but what is fascinating is the way he frames his book within the boundaries of the courtroom genre in which he's worked. A moderate Israeli prime minister is assassinated in San Francisco, and a Palestinian woman is accused of having masterminded the killing. For her defense, she turns to a prominent local attorney, with whom she had a secret affair in law school, and who is, of course, Jewish.

On the face of it, very different books. Indeed, Patterson's follows his template, which is that of a lawyer, sometimes a lawyer turned politician, engaged in a battle where his loyalties to individuals will be set against both his self-interest and usually his overall aim. It breaks the mold in that the lawyer in question, David Wolfe, is not one of the small circle of characters who recur in Patterson's other novels, and which is one of the things that keeps them interesting, even when the people themselves seem too good to be true. The story becomes, for a long while, Wolfe's own initiation into the intricacies of the conflict, forcing him not so much to choose sides as to reconsider the whole element of sides themselves. Which is, in the end, what Patterson has set out to do. The title of the book reflects the fact that both the Jewish people and the Palestinians are exiles, and winds up taking a very balanced perspective on the roots of the conflict, or, more importantly, the prospects of solution for it. Patterson's is a very liberal approach, recognising common ground, common struggles and common humanity, and what he is at greatest pains to reveal is the way that the conflict has become self-perpetuating, with vested interests of both sides with no desire to see it stop at anything short of total victory.

But the novel itself remains a typically Patterson courtroom battle, with the resolution very much one of personal betrayal, which is the core of all his novels that do resolve themselves in courtooms, rather than the political process. As is frequently the case, the ultimate villain is pretty obvious early on, but the reader is given plenty of uncertainties along the way. That he chose not to pursue this issue with a series character like President Kerry Kilcannon (as I said, most of Patterson's books have featured a cast of recurring, and often interlocking, characters) is significant in itself, and a signal of how intractable he finds the situation. Thus when Wolfe goes to Israel, his education becomes the readers, and there really isn't too much point to the trip other than that.

Littell's book is much more grounded in the world of intelligence, and where Wolfe's attempts to get to the root of the intelligence are an issue for him and his client, in Littell's book the workings of intelligence agencies (and the Palestinians own equivalent) are the core of the story. Its ultimate point, however, is very close to Patterson's, in that his extremist rabbi and Palestinian kidnapper are inevitably drawn together, closer and closer, to the point where their enmity becomes self-contradictory. At the heart of both books is a real sense, an outsiders' sense, that these two peoples are indeed more similar than different, and that a solution is possible. If Littell's ultimate twist turns out to be a personal one, and perhaps not totally convincing in terms of execution, if not character, it is the solution to which he has been building all through the story. Perhaps because his books deal with intelligence professionals, rather than lawyers, Littell may have more faith in the ultimate good intentions of such men.

That the crime and espionage genre should be the place such issues are addressed is fascinating in itself. Speaking about a McCain rally, where the candidate himself repudiated calls by Mitt Romney and Rudi Giuliani for 'more Guantanamos' by asking if America really wanted a 'second Spanish Inquisition', Matt Taibbi reflected that it's a strange world where speaking out against the Inquisition can be seen as an act of political courage. This is more evident for Patterson, who, as a lawyer has presented a balanced case. It's more bleak for Littell, who has laid out the details on the ground, and sees the most promising future for the enforcers, not the peace-makers. These are two informed and revealing books, and make a finely matched pair.