I’ve now read quite a few John Grisham books and enjoy his detail and plausible, finely crafted delivery of the plot. That said, he does have a habit of keeping something so far up his sleeve that you just have to persevere blindly and trust that it’ll all come together in a satisfying conclusion.
The Racketeer tells the story of a lawyer serving 10 years in jail after the feds pinned a racketeering charge on him by virtue of association with a client. With a burning sense of injustice, he keeps his nose clean and ends up in a lenient, open compound style of jail where he concocts a mechanism of leverage to secure his release and give the feds a bloody nose in the process.
The story unfolds at a good pace (compared to, say, Sycamore Row) by Grisham’s standards. However, I found the main protagonist in The Racketeer to become increasingly smug to the point where I lost empathy for him. As the story wore on I found myself hoping, if only a little, that his whole charade would come undone and he’d end up incarcerated again by the end of it.
As it happened, the ending was reasonably satisfying but the book did take me the best part of 3 weeks commuting to get through so I’m already a bit behind in this challenge. I’ll need to pick up the pace!
