"Camino Island" by John Grisham

Above: CAMINO ISLAND. John Grisham 290 pages.
I completed reading this book today.

By the way, I remain an inveterate supporter of buying real books from independent bookstores. I prefer reading real books... as opposed to reading e-books.

I haven't read a Grisham novel since I read "The Firm," in 1991, when it was first published.

The movie, "The Firm," 1993, was memorable for its appealing cast, Jeanne Tripplehorne, Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman.'

Its not that I don't like Grisham... too many other writers entered my fiction space, and crowded Grisham out. Lee Child, Daniel Silva, and Nelson DeMille hold the first three slots on my fiction bookshelf.

But, while wandering around the Cooper Young district of Memphis, last week, TIMDT and Mwah (sic) came upon Burke's, an independent bookstore. There is rarely a bookstore I come upon these days that I won't enter to browse.

Burke's, a store front on Cooper, was suitably book-ey. Dusty shelves of used books extended to the far rear of the deep, narrow store. New books near the front. Old building, scraped up wood floors, furniture and fittings seemingly from another era.

Near the front of the store were stacks and stacks of new cardboard boxes on top of which were stacked a few copies of the book contents of the boxes... John Grisham's newest novel, "Camino Island."

The thirty or forty books on top of the book boxes were First Edition, autographed copies of Grisham's new novel. I realized, "here I am in Memphis. Grisham ground zero. Here are a ton of his first edition books at this funky book store. Maybe I'd better get a copy."

I picked up a book to make sure the autograph was there, it was, so I bought it.

By the way, I remain an inveterate supporter of buying real books from independent bookstores. I prefer reading real books... as opposed to reading e-books.

There is something about a book... handling it, flipping the pages back and forth, throwing it on a sofa, seeing it squeezed in on a book shelf, marking it up... sloppily... that cannot be replicated on a device.

A recent piece from the National Book Review cited ten reasons why print books are better than e-books:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-national-book-review/drop-that-kindle-10-reaso_b_8234890.html

"Camino Island" is about the theft of valuable documents from a supposedly impregnable university library vault.

Some interesting moral dilemmas are raised. The thieves are caught and the university gets the valuable papers back... but, beaucoup illicit money is made by various middlemen who evade justice.

The insurance company hires some very sophisticated rare documents sleuths who track down the main middleman perp, a proprietor of a funky, vacation town bookstore, not unlike Burke's in Memphis, where I picked up my own copy of "Camino Island."

The sleuths don't have the evidence they need to prove their supposition, so they find, conveniently enough, a budding (in more ways than one) female author to move into town to learn more about the alleged book store owner perp.

The author plant is broke and under the yoke of student loans she needs to pay off, so, she accepts the lucrative task to infiltrate (and become intimate?) with the "perp." Another moral dilema.

Apart from page turning plot reading, one learns a lot about rare documents, valuable first editions, and the channels where they circulate.

The book is fun and informative to read if you have some time on your hands.... and if you've read everything else Lee Child, Daniel Silva, and Nelson DeMille have written.

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