Camino Winds

 

Camino Winds – by John Grisham

A sequel, of sorts, to John Grisham’s “Camino Island”. I wasn’t too crazy about that one, and my opinion of this one isn’t much better.  I’ve said this countless times about John Grisham: He needs to stop churning out 2-3 books per year, and instead focus only on 1 book every 2-3 years.  I guess the accountants at his publishing house think otherwise.  The story here is good overall, but it lacks anything substantial and seems to be unnecessarily padded. When you have to pad a book that’s only about 290 pages, that’s not a good sign.  Example: When we meet an individual who is extremely health conscious, we don’t need to be told exactly what she is eating every time she sits down for a meal at a restaurant. She’s a health nut. We get it John. Enough. Information like this is pretty useless unless it’s somehow related to the plot, and it never is.

Camino Island is a place where a lot of semi-successful authors live.  That alone sounds suspect.  I mean, even moderately successful authors are truly rare, and do they really all live and hang out together on an island?  Bruce Cable owns a bookstore on the island, so he serves as sort of a center for all these bizarre personalities.  I guess maybe I shouldn’t raise my eyebrows at the 70-year-old lesbian couple who writes soft porn novels, especially when Bruce himself is in an “open” marriage that nobody seems to really care about.  Maybe I live a sheltered life, but thankfully I don’t know a single person with such living arrangements. All these characters also drink alcohol like it’s going out of style.  If it’s possible to get a hangover from simply reading about people drinking, this book will certainly do it to you.

Anyway, a massive category 4 hurricane is about to hit the island. Most leave, but Bruce and a few others stay. After the storm, they discover one of their writer friends dead out in his yard.  It seems he was hit pretty hard in the head by some flying debris during the storm.  

Or did something else more sinister happen?

Well, Bruce and a couple of friends play detective and manage to uncover an awful lot in a very short amount of time.  This book, with the story better fleshed out, probably should have been about twice as long as it was.  But I guess John Grisham had a deadline, so ‘i’s get dotted and ‘t’s get crossed rather quickly. Anyway, without giving away too much of the plot, this book turns into yet another one of John Grisham’s insistent championing of the little people who find themselves at the mercy of the big bad corporate baddies.  You know, the evil people at the top who make hundreds of millions of dollars by performing activities that are highly immoral and illegal. In the meantime, the masses of minimum wage underlings at the bottom of the corporate ladder have to sweat and scrimp while being paid scale.  They can’t, you know, go look for a better job or anything because they’re always a single parent with 4 or 5 young kids. So who has time to look for another job?

Sadly, nothing really stands out in this book.  John Grisham does always manage to hold his reader’s attention, but this one was way too forced, too contrived, and an obvious attempt for him to rake in another few million or so.   I didn’t enjoy my trip back to Camino Island that much, and I really hope that we never go back there again.    Let’s hope all of the characters do the right thing and check themselves into alcoholics anonymous.  Surely Grisham wouldn’t write about that, would he?