Book Blog #315: The Client by John Grisham

 

Title: The Client

Author: John Grisham

# of Pages: 401 (hardback)

Genre: Adult, Mystery, Thriller

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Synopsis: This is the story of eleven-year-old Mark Sway, who as the novel opens, witnesses the bizarre suicide of a New Orleans attorney. Just before he dies, the lawyer tells Mark a deadly secret concerning the recent murder of a Louisiana Senator, whose accused killer, Mafia thug Barry Muldanno, is about to go to trial. The police, the federal prosecutor and the FBI pressure Mark to tell them the attorney's last words, but he knows that with the mob watching his every move, revealing his secret will almost surely get him killed.

Review: Jeez, this was a hard one to keep picking up. And even when I did muster the energy to pick it up, it was just so easy to put it down again, thus why it took over 4 months for me to get through this book. 

I've tried (and failed) to read John Grisham's books before, for the same reasons and should have learned my lesson and stayed far away. I can see how there is a market for this sort of thing - especially suckers for crime mystery/thrillers. I wouldn't say I'm not in the category, but it requires a little more craftsmanship in the writing to get me hooked. 

Mystery is an easy way to keep a reader interested - in this book, the mystery is how the young protagonist Mark handle a critical secret that the Mafia would be willing to kill him over. Unfortunately for The Client, even the allure of this mystery is not enough to keep the reader interested in the first half of the story. The story is told over the course of a week, but with all the unnecessary details Grisham decides to add in - such as repeatedly emphasizing how overweight a judge is - it felt more like months. 

The story does pick up at the end (as most mysteries do), but Grisham could have actually milked the ending longer. The ending was abrupt - it would have been more satisfying to flesh this part out about and cut a good portion of the beginning where there is too much character development and not enough plot progression. Sometimes abrupt ending leaving the reader thinking - this ending made me feel robbed of the time I invested reading the beginning only to get a rushed ending.

And of course, likely the biggest contributor to why it took so long for me to finish this book - the third person POV switching. Grisham decided to switch between the POV of pretty much ANYONE in the book. This is frustrating because I found myself being very interested in Mark's POV but much less in the accussed killer Barry, the FBI agents, etc. Not only that, but Grisham pretty clearly spells everything out - with multiple POVs, there's hardly a mystery to the reader even if there's a huge mystery for the rest of the characters. 

I would not recommend this book unless you're interested in anything (even the mediocre) crime and mystery genre or if you've already read some of Grisham's books and liked his work.