Stormy Reading
A hurricane provides a cover-up for murder
What better way to spend a day in the middle of hurricane season than reading a thriller about a murder committed during a Category 4 storm on an island off the coast of Florida. John Grisham takes you there in the midst of Hurricane Leo, which provides the backdrop for the mysterious death of Nelson Kerr, an author with an explosive revelatory book about to come out.
For Camino Winds, Grisham steps away from his stock-in-trade—legal thrillers—to present a story centering around bookstore owner Bruce Cable, whose shop on the fictional Camino Island (thought to be modeled after Amelia Island near Jacksonville) is the nucleus for his inner circle of authors and friends. The victim in this case is among them.
The drama of the hurricane is over by page 38 and the story morphs into a good old-fashioned murder mystery. Was Kerr a victim of the storm, taking some fatal blows to the head from flying debris? Or were the injuries inflicted by a strange woman who arrived in town just before the hurricane, befriended the victim and vanished during the storm?
The local police, already overwhelmed by the aftermath of Hurricane Leo, are of little help. Cable and his friends take it upon themselves to solve the mystery surrounding their buddy’s death.
Against a backdrop of chainsaws and generators, they investigate the crime scene and come up with their own theories about the crime. Key to it all is the missing manuscript that the victim was about to have published, which may reveal a network of nursing-home abuse and Medicare fraud.
Cable is a fun character, given to bow ties, seersucker suits and female authors. His friends consists of a halfdozen or so quirky personalities, all of whom make for entertaining reading.
Grisham seems to enjoy writing about his own—authors and publishers and booksellers. Camino Winds is a follow-up to the earlier
Camino Island Island, published in 2017 and involving many of the same characters in a plot dealing with the theft of rare books.
He is not the first author to use a hurricane as a plot device in a thriller. John D. MacDonald did a masterful job in his 1977 novel Condominium, about an evil developer, corrupt politicians and Hurricane Ella bearing down on the innocent residents of a high-rise on fictional Fiddlers Key, most likely situated off the coast of Sarasota, where MacDonald lived.
Either book will keep you engaged on a hot summer afternoon—all the while keeping one eye on the tropical weather outlook from the National Hurricane Center.
Grisham seems to enjoy writing about his own—authors and publishers and booksellers. Camino Winds is a follow-up to the earlier Camino Island, published in 2017 and involving many of the same characters in a plot dealing with the theft of rare books.