The Pelican Brief | John Grisham

The Pelican Brief | John Grisham | Supreme Court Murders -- No Clear Motive

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The Pelican Brief

	The Pelican Brief John Grisham Island, 1993 - 436 pages average customer review:based on 208 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In suburban Georgetown a killer's Reeboks whisper on the front floor of a posh home... In a seedy D.C. porno house a patron is swiftly garroted to death... The next day America learns that two of its Supreme Court justices have been assassinated. And in New Orleans, a young law student prepares a legal brief... To Darby Shaw it was no more than a legal shot in the dark, a brilliant guess. To the Washington establishment it was political dynamite. Suddenly Darby is witness to a murder -- a murder intended for her. Going underground, she finds there is only one person she can trust -- an ambitious reporter after a newsbreak hotter than Watergate -- to help her piece together the deadly puzzle. Somewhere between the bayous of Louisiana and the White House's inner sanctums, a violent cover-up is being engineered. For somone has read Darby's brief. Someone who will stop at nothing to destroy the evidence of an unthinkable crime.

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A Real Page Turner

Grisham is a great writer and started great with his first three novels with this being his third. I give a five star rating when I can't stop turning the pages and do not want to put the book down. The story has backgrounds in New Orleans. Washington, D.C., and New York City.

This story was non-stop action and suspense with rivetting excitment. It has a heroine, Darby Shaw, who is beautiful and smart. She is a law student who does a Brief on the murder of two Supreme Court Justices. This causes a lot of people to be murdered and puts Darby on a run for her life. This all started with an injunction to stop oil drilling in the marshes of Louisiana and try to save the home of the Brown Pelicans.

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Supreme Court Murders -- No Clear Motive

Washington wakes up to the gruesome news that two members of the Supreme Court have been murdered overnight. The shocking part was in their diversity. The old, should have retired years ago, Democrat Justice Rosenberg and the younger Republican Justice Jensen. The fact that they were almost always on opposite sides of any issue left law enforcement with no clear political motive. The only clues left behind seemed to be ones of the killer's choosing. A nylon cord used to garrote Jensen as he sat in a movie house watching a porno film. The Rosenberg affair was messy - three people dead, three 22-caliber bullets to the head of each victim Rosenberg, a guard and an aid.
Down in bayou country Tulane University law professor Thomas Callahan on hearing the news got roaring drunk to ease the pain. Rosenberg was one of his idols and he couldn't believe the end had come.
While the whole country pondered the reason behind the killings Darby Shaw, a bright law student and bed partner of professor Callahan turns sleuth. Ms. Shaw pores over the current Supreme Court docket and eventually comes up with a promising case. And for the next four days she shuffles through pages of affidavits detailing lies and abuses by lawyers and their clients.
In the end Darby Shaw writes an eight-page draft of what will later be called the Pelican Brief. Shaw is only half convinced that she is on to something, however, in spite of her skepticism she turns the pages over to Callahan.
Callahan attends the Rosenberg funeral in Washington and passes the brief along to a colleague. And once copies of those pages get into the wrong hands Darby Shaw becomes the hunted.
John Grisham takes us through a fast paced cat and mouse investigation, and in the end solves the puzzle to everyone's satisfaction.

Tom Barnes author of:
`The Goring Collection'
`The Hurricane Hunters and Lost in the Bermuda Triangle'
`Doc Holliday's Road to Tombstone'
The Goring Collection
The Hurricane Hunters And Lost in the Bermuda Triangle
Doc Holliday's Road to Tombstone: The Life and Times of John Henry Holliday

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My favorite book. Ever.

Rather shocked to see any negative reviews. This book is a wonderful page turner. I was lost in the world of small intelligent law student, fighting for her life inside the world of DC powerhouses and the elite rich. Gripping. I still think about the book often, and I read it about 6 years ago. Great read.

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.

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