Camino Island

If you didn’t know the name John Grisham then you’ve found this blog my mistake. This is a different kind of crime novel, one about what Grisham calls “the murky world of private espionage.” In the case of Camino Island, the author writes about the theft of five original manuscripts by F. Scott Fitzgerald directly from the Firestone Library at Princeton. The originals are a treasure, worth $25,000,000. First, there is the faking of the identity of someone in order to gain access to the library and the manuscripts. There’s hacking of the university’s computer systems and then the theft. But of course, someone has to be willing to buy and trade in the stolen goods, and that is what gets us to Camino Island, a small community on the Florida Coast, just north of Jacksonville. Next, there’s the efforts of the insurance company to find the documents so they don’t have to pay the claim. And Princeton does not want the money, they just want the documents returned.

Grisham has put forward a great cast of characters: the team of five thieves (Denny, Mark, Trey, Jerry, and Ahmed), the FBI agents, Bruce Cable (the charismatic book store owner and book dealer in Camino Island), the group of authors who made Camino Island their home, Noelle Bonnet who is Cable’s open-marriage wife, the insurance agent Elaine Shelby, and Mercer Mann a literature professor who hates teaching in Chapel Hill but cannot write anything of her own. The community of writers on Camino Island thrived on petty jealousies while still hoping for each other’s success.

I’ve always thought Grisham was at his best when he was writing a drama that ended up in a courtroom – but there’s no courtroom in this novel. It’s entertaining, maybe not Grisham at the very top of his game, but if you read this one, you will be hooked. I couldn’t put it down.