Saturday, November 8, 2014

Gray Mountain - John Grisham

The latest John Grisham at the lowest cost I have paid for a thriller yet. Thanks to the eCommerce price wars, I was able to buy this for Rs. 250. My advice is, buy all the books you can before it all upends and bursts all over the place. PS: The book is published by Hachette, which is also in a price war with Amazon. (The price for the same book in Amazon was 275, higher than Flipkart at 250)

Now to the book, it is classic John Grisham and it is not. The classic elements of the big bad guys and low David's, weird laws and the ins and outs of the American judicial system, small town America all there. But the "Hero" in this story - Samantha Kofer, who gets laid off from a big law firm during the 2008 financial crisis is mostly a spectator to the heroics of the rest of the cast. Moving to 'coal country' Virginia to work as an unpaid intern in a legal clinic, she encounters first hand the ravages of strip mining of coal and the effects it has on the local ecology and it's poverty stricken residents. What struck me again and again is that this could be a story happening in a third world country like mine. And call it coincidence or fluke, I came across this article on the very day I was reading the book - http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Accursed-County/292455. Read it please and find out the price we pay for 10% of the power in our own country.

What I loved about the book was that it's not a thriller in the strictest sense. There are just few changes in the 'big picture' before and after the events in the book, and there are no thrilling victories or even a moderately happy ending. The only change is in the mindset of the protagonist and in the ending, we do not even know whether it will last.

7/10