The Rainmaker by John Grisham. Century $150 HERE'S another John Grisham written to his regular formula. He writes a book every 12 months or so and with this latest thriller, the writer of The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client and last year The Chamber has produced a story which goes straight from A to Z without messing around with anything else in between.
From page one, you know what to expect. From page two, the linear plot and all those little tricks of the Grisham trade begin to irritate, like an itch you can't reach.
The Rainmaker is nothing more than a story. Not a bad one, but far from a brilliant one. There are no themes and no characters. The closest Grisham gets to making a point, or indeed to any degree of healthy cynicism, is to say lawyers are overpaid.
This is hardly a revelation. If lawyers earned the same salaries as schoolteachers, there would be no lawyers. If the general public got sick and tired of a courtroom drama, there would be no John Grisham.
But the public loves John Grisham, though it's getting harder to see the appeal. After all, The Rainmaker has all been done before, mostly by Grisham himself.
The protagonist, fresh out of law school and without a bread-and-butter damages case to his name, is a male version of the young law student heroine in The Pelican Brief.