Doubleday, Feb 2002

I think John Grisham is a very talented writer. I love his legal mystery/suspense/adventure yarns. They always keep my attention. They even keep me awake when I read late at night, which is high praise indeed.

Except this one.

In a nutshell, this is the story of a dying southern judge who summons his two estranged sons to a meeting to discuss his estate.  One son is a law professor while the other is a ne’er-do-well addict and playboy.  When they arrive they find their father dead, with a hand-written one-page will that splits the estate evenly between the two.  As his estate was paltry, consisting of a run-down house and a few thousand dollars in the bank, the division of the estate hardly mattered.

But some things were puzzling. Why had the man left a hand-written will when he had a perfectly valid one, written just a few months before, on file with his lawyer friend?  Why summon the sons at all if there was really nothing to discuss?

Moot questions, if would seem.  Until the professor son discovers $3.1 million, in cash, in boxes in his father’s home office cabinets.

Where did it come from? Was the purpose of the summons to discuss this cash?  What should be done with it?

That is the central question in this book: what is to be done with the cash?  The “right” thing would be to declare it as part of the estate.  But then the public would ask the same question: where did it come from?  As the judge had a reputation as a scrupulously honest and fair judge, his legacy would be tarnished with rumor and suspicion.  Maybe he won it gambling and the son spends a quarter of the book trying to decide if that was possible. It wasn’t.

So maybe just keep the money and, over time, launder it and spend it on his cherished dream: a nice private aircraft.  One decision was easy: he would NOT share it with his brother because he would just use it to buy drugs and that would kill him.

One rationalization follows another.  He hides the money in a storage locker, then visits the locker nearly every day to make sure the money is still safe.  He begins to obsess about the money.  Can’t sleep.  Can’t focus on his work.  He starts to look a bit insane, like Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. His obsession turns to fear when notes begin to arrive which makes it apparent that someone – no idea who – knows that he has the money.

The rest of the book is about how he tracks down the source of the money and what happens to it. As I write this I realize that it sounds better than it was. For a Grisham novel, the plot was very thin and the characters were not very interesting. This was probably my least favorite of all the Grisham novels that I have read.

3 out of 10.

Dell Publishing, 1986

There are books where the genesis of the title is obvious, like Green Eggs and Ham. There are books where the title is not immediately obvious, but is revealed in the reading, such as The Hunt for Red October or The Red Badge of Courage. Then there are books which, when finished, you are left scratching your head, wondering “where the heck did THAT title come from?” like Cry, The Beloved Country. Taming the Sea-Horse is one of those.

This is one of the series featuring Spenser as the very masculine PI with a heart of gold.  This is the 15th in the series.  If you love Spenser you will enjoy this one because he does all the Spenser-esque things that you love: punches the lights out on some bad guys, stands up to mobsters and other assorted cretins (example: he overpowers two would-be assassins, spray-paints their hair pink and sends them packing), wise-asses his way through some incredibly dangerous predicaments and, in the end, gets the girl.  If you know Spenser you know that “getting the girl” does not involve sex as he is 100% monogamous and totally in love with his psychologist FWB, Susan, who he stumpfs innumerable times (which is the other reason he keeps in great shape).  No, in this case the girl is a young hooker that he snatches from the clutches of some bad guys in New York who happen to have some Boston buddies. It is just the kind of thing a PI with a heart of gold would do.

The Spenser novels are all set in Boston, so if you like reading narratives involving real Boston locations and institutions, then you have another reason to like this book.

I like all those things so, despite my puzzlement over the title, I enjoyed this book very much.  Not a deep plot, but a fun ride.

7 out of 10.

s

Berkley Edition, May 1997

If you are familiar with Dale Brown’s books – particularly those that feature Patrick McLanahan as the protagonist – then you will already be aware that this book is chock full of whiz-bang military hardware, outlandish military threats to the United States and save-the-country heroics by McLanahan. In this case the bad guys are the Iranians and they aren’t threatening the U.S. as a whole, just the U.S.’s aircraft carrier group in the Persian Gulf. The action kicks off with the Iranians detecting and destroying a U.S. spy ship and capturing 13 of the “civilian” crewmen – most of whom were, in fact, spies. Nevermind that the U.S. was doing something that is really shouldn’t have been doing; we needed to kick some butt to get the Iranians back in line. But how?

The obvious answer: take an experimental B-2 strategic bomber, equip it with the latest in high-tech gizmos, assign it to a super-secret intelligence agency and assemble a crew of mostly civilian crewmen, led by McLanahan, to act at the “tip of the spear.” Yes, I know this all sounds highly implausible and it is.  So if you aren’t willing to suspend your disbelief and go along for the whole implausible ride, then just forget about this book.

It is wordy and Brown always gets way deep into details of military hardware that may or may not be accurate.  So the appeal is mostly to military geeks and those who like military escapism.

I had a hard time letting go of my skepticism on this one.

4 out of 10.