Product Description

Two Supreme Court Justices are dead. Their murders are connected only in one mind, and in one legal brief conceived by that mind. Brilliant, beautiful and ambitious, New Orleans legal student Darby Shaw little realises that her speculative brief will penetrate to the highest levels of power in Washington and cause shockwaves there. Shockwaves that will see her boyfriend atomised in a bomb blast, that will send hired killers chasing after her, that will propel her across the country to meet investigative reporter Gray Grantham, the one man who is as near the truth as she is.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8053 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Review
Gripping legal suspenser by the author of last year's hallucinatory The Firm - and an even stronger performance than that still-current bestseller. Grisham also strikes gold with public awareness of the furor over the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Thomas. Where The Firm clamped into the reader's greed for the perks of a supersuccessful young lawyer in an almost fantasy law firm, Grisham's second is a tale that baits its own hooks with the lures of All the President's Men. That much of what happens here happens regularly in suspense novels (sudden stranglings and murders) in no way lessens the novel's intensity and feeling of freshness - a freshness that springs in both novels from Grisham's focus on top law students, cloistered brains who find themselves raw beginners in the real world but afloat on cash. Here, second-year law student at Tulane Derby Shaw sets out to solve the seemingly motiveless simultaneous murders of two largely liberal Supreme Court judges who were killed two hours apart on the same night. A lone assassin or a conspiracy? Clearly someone wants the conservative Republican president, a grandfatherly nerd mainly interested in his golf game, to pack the already conservative Court. Darby reviews hundreds of the Court's upcoming cases and sees only one that fulfills the breadth of evil needed to account for such desperate measures as double murder: a multibillion-dollar oil venture in Louisiana that will kilt off the state's beloved but endangered brown pelican. Derby's brief on this "fictional" case finds its way to the White House, the FBI, and the CIA. Then Darby's lover, her constitutional-law professor, to whom she has shown the brief, is blown up in a car-bomb explosion meant also to have killed Darby. The story's vitality springs from Grisham's relentless enlivening of Derby's fears as she flees about the country in a closing web of killers while trying to help Washington Post reporter Gray Grantham get the goods on the baddies in a newsbreak bigger than Watergate. Must entertainment for legal folk. Should outsell The Firm. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
Two Supreme Court Justices are dead. Their murders are connected only in one mind, and in one legal brief conceived by that mind. Brilliant, beautiful and ambitious, New Orleans legal student Darby Shaw little realises that her speculative brief will penetrate to the highest levels of power in Washington and cause shockwaves there. Shockwaves that will see her boyfriend atomised in a bomb blast, that will send hired killers chasing after her, that will propel her across the country to meet investigative reporter Gray Grantham, the one man who is as near the truth as she is.

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Customer Reviews

Surprisingly awful
This is the first John Grisham I have read and will almost certainly be the last. None of the characters are particularly appealing or interesting; it is actually the President of the USA who seems the most accessible figure. Darby Shaw, legal student, is supposed to be the heroine of the book yet I don't care what happens to her. And why do I need to know so constantly about her stunning looks, every time she changes her appearance? Her relationship with the drunken law tutor was unpleasant and the bit about him liking to paint her toenails with red nail-polish made me feel fairly queasy. Perhaps the book just felt dated, despite being written in the early 1990s - I found the professor-student relationship, the last of many that Thomas Callahan had over the years - repellent. He was no loss when he died in a bomb blast. The plot also seems paper-thin; the 'little brief' that Darby writes miraculously manages to get to the President of the USA. And it takes to past page 220 before the reader is told why it is called the Pelican brief. Neither did I find the killing of the guy who has been the world's best assassin for 20 years at all credible, and while he is holding Darby's hand. As for the FBI, CIA and other agencies, none of the characters were anything other than bland.
Having heard so much about John Grisham over the years I found it baffling that this book was so poor. And finally, having taken the book on holiday if I hadn't been in short supply of reading matter I certainly wouldn't have bothered finishing it.

A Time Filler
The Pelican Brief is a good time filler.

I took four sessions to finish the 420-odd pages, and didn't feel pressed for time - it is a rapid read.

The plot is sort of realistic in that you can imagine someone wanting to bump off a couple of American Supreme Court justices to change the `political' make-up of the Supreme court - but the book does stretch credibility a little with the descriptions and personalities of both the victims and their executioner - it seemed as though Gresham had gone through a check list of `most likely to make a best seller' qualities and selected them for inclusion.

The same too with his heroine, Darby Shaw, who is a least female and intelligent - more intelligent than most of the other characters in the book. However, she never really escapes the cliché of female as victim in need of a good man to support her. Why did she have to be a blond bombshell? Why couldn't she have been short, stumpy even, and ugly? Why does the book have to end in such a `happy ever after' way on a beach?

One answer is the sales figures - and film rights.

All the way through I felt I was getting exactly what I wanted - no surprise other than a needed plot twist, no truly ambiguous character - just good guy and bad guy (and a very obvious - you got it wrong, good guy portrayed as bad).

And some very film-able locations - including Washington, New York and a pre-deluge New Orleans.

It occupied me pleasantly enough, but I ended with a - that's it? and so what? Turned the light off, and slept well.

Corrupt Lawyers Act on Behalf of a Corrupt Client to Manipulate Corrupt Politicians and Be Chased by Investigative Reporters
If you are thinking about going to law school, this wouldn't be a bad novel to read to get a sense of what the profession is all about before you commit yourself to three expensive (and potentially boring) years of education. I don't recall a book that displays so many of the corrupt sides of legal practice and education in a single fictional tale. If that weren't enough, the book also delves deeply into the international assassination genre and creates a modern-day fictional version of investigating a government cover-up at the highest levels, a la Watergate.

But a pure heart among all the jaded ones can make a difference . . . that's the morale of this story as beautiful, dedicated, and brilliant law student Darby Shaw speculates on what motive might tie the assassination of two Supreme Court justices back to a pending legal case. Improbably (the weakest part of the story), she sniffs out the potential that no one else does -- that this is an attempt to fix an appeal.

The Pelican Brief as a title is a misnomer. Darby writes her thoughts (a crude essay, not a brief) about what might be going on and shares them with her professor lover who passes them along to a counsel for the FBI. Pretty soon someone is taking her ideas seriously, and the pages will fly through your fingers as fast as you can read until you get to the end.

John Grisham doesn't quite have his genres down in this book, and apparently the success of The Firm meant that his editors were more interested in getting The Pelican Brief published than making it better. You could fix this novel into a five-star effort with about two hours of editing to reduce the improbabilities and speed up the slow parts.

But if you don't mind having unlikely events pull a riveting story together, you'll have a lot of fun with The Pelican Brief. I listened to the reading by Alexander Adams and felt that the story worked better listened to than it would be if read silently.

I admire John Grisham for the imagination to conceive of such a wild story. He kept surprising me with his plot developments, and the trip was almost all fun.