Book 65 - John Grisham - The Pelican Brief

Another dive into the depths of John Grisham’s past with his third novel from 1992 made famous as a movie starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. It is clear to see, the author has already come along leaps and bounds from his horrifically described murders in his first novel, ‘A Time to Kill’ from 1989.

Two Supreme Court judges are assassinated and there appears to be no clear motive until a second year law student uncovers a conspiracy that seems to go to the top of the US government. As those around her are murdered, she goes on the run to try and stay ahead of the killers and save her own life. Darby Shaw, flees from the FBI...CIA...and seems to be able to only trust one man, Gray Grantham a reporter from the Washington Post. A taut thriller which leads to a race for evidence...a race for witnesses and then a race for her life.

Tense without being fantastical and real enough for you to imagine that the links between organised crime and the government could actually happen. The one letdown is the rather contrived ending which I found myself rolling my eyes at. But another great book that although linked with the legal system shows the trajectory of Grisham’s books that use the law as the hook to tell a great thriller.

And why ‘The Pelican Brief’ ? Well...that would ruin the nuts and bolts of the story and isn’t revealed for quite some time in the novel ... great stuff ( )

The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:

--Print: COPYRIGHT ©: 2/15/1992; ISBN: 978-0385421980; PUBLISHER: Doubleday (Random House); PAGES: 384; UNABRIDGED; (Info from Amazon.com)
--Digital: ©: 3/9/2010; ISBN: 9780307576170; PUBLISHER: Vintage; PAGES: 434; Unabridged (Info from Amazon.com)
--*(this one) Audio: COPYRIGHT ©: 12/15/1999; PUBLISHER: Random House Audio; DURATION: 5: hrs, 36 min; Abridged; (Info from Amazon)
--Feature Film or tv: Yes, 1993, starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington, among others.

SERIES: No

MAIN CHARACTERS: (Not comprehensive)
Darby Shaw – law student at Tulane University
Gray Grantham – Journalist at The Washington Post
Gavin Verheek – Callahan’s friend from law school, now special counsel to the director of the FBI

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
--SELECTED: I’d been skipping this one, because I don’t care for abridgements, but I came to the conclusion that for some reason there never was or ever will be an unabridged audio of this one and it was too good of a story to ignore.
--ABOUT: Two Supreme Court Judges are murdered. There are numerous hate groups regularly protesting the courts decisions, so the list of suspects is looking impossibly long. But one of the victims had a good friend in a former clerk, now a professor at Tulane University, Professor Thomas Callahan. And Professor Callahan has a young girlfriend, Darby, who is also one of his students. Darby is not only one of his students, she is the brightest and most dedicated. As a pet project, and an offering to Callahan, Darby takes time out from classes to hole up in the law library and put her mind to solving the murders. Considering motive, she determines that big money must be available as well as at issue. She develops a fairly sound theory and writes a brief detailing logistics and outlining how and why her chosen suspect might want these particular justices dead. By the time she is done, she is less convinced that her theory is plausible but hands the brief to the professor anyway, who passes it on to his old law school friend, now special counsel to the FBI, Gavin. The action intensifies when Darby’s brief winds up in White House circles.
--OVERALL IMPRESSION: I’d seen the movie (more than once) ages ago, but as always, the book, even though abridged, reveals details I either never knew, or that didn’t make the movie cut.

AUTHOR:
John Grisham: (FROM Wikipedia)
“Grisham, the second of five children, was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Wanda (née Skidmore) and John Ray Grisham.[6] His father was a construction worker and a cotton farmer, and his mother was a homemaker.[9] When Grisham was four years old, his family settled in Southaven, Mississippi, a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee.[6]
As a child, he wanted to be a baseball player.[8] As noted in the foreword to Calico Joe, Grisham gave up playing baseball at the age of 18, after a game in which a pitcher aimed a beanball at him, and narrowly missed doing the young Grisham grave harm.
Although Grisham's parents lacked formal education, his mother encouraged him to read and prepare for college.[1] He drew on his childhood experiences for his novel A Painted House.[6] Grisham started working for a plant nursery as a teenager, watering bushes for $1.00 an hour. He was soon promoted to a fence crew for $1.50 an hour. He wrote about the job: "there was no future in it". At 16, Grisham took a job with a plumbing contractor but says he "never drew inspiration from that miserable work".[10]
Through one of his father's contacts, he managed to find work on a highway asphalt crew in Mississippi at age 17. It was during this time that an unfortunate incident got him "serious" about college. A fight with gunfire broke out among the crew causing Grisham to run to a nearby restroom to find safety. He did not come out until after the police had detained the perpetrators. He hitchhiked home and started thinking about college. His next work was in retail, as a salesclerk in a department store men's underwear section, which he described as "humiliating". By this time, Grisham was halfway through college. Planning to become a tax lawyer, he was soon overcome by "the complexity and lunacy" of it. He decided to return to his hometown as a trial lawyer.[11]
He attended the Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi and later attended Delta State University in Cleveland.[6] Grisham changed colleges three times before completing a degree.[1] He eventually graduated from Mississippi State University in 1977, receiving a B.S. degree in accounting. He later enrolled in the University of Mississippi School of Law to become a tax lawyer, but his interest shifted to general civil litigation. He graduated in 1981 with a J.D. degree.[6]
After leaving law school, he participated in some missionary work in Brazil, under the First Baptist Church of Oxford.[12]”
--FROM the book:
“John Grisham is the author of forty-eight consecutive # 1 bestsellers, which have been translated into nearly fifty languages. Grisham is a two-time winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was honored with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction. When he’s not writing, Grisham serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project and of Centurian Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. Much of his fiction explores deep-seated problems in our criminal justice system. Grisham lives on a farm in central Virginia.”

NARRATOR:
Anthony Heald- From Wikipedia:
“Anthony Heald is an American character actor known for portraying Hannibal Lecter's jailer, Dr. Frederick Chilton, in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Red Dragon (2002), and for playing vice principal Scott Guber in David E. Kelley's Boston Public (2000–2004). Heald also had a recurring role as Judge Cooper on Kelley's The Practice and Boston Legal.[note 1] He had a prominent role as a troubled psychic in The X-Files episode "Closure".”
*ME I like this actor, and he does great with this narration.

GENRE:
Fiction; Legal Thriller, Crime, Suspense

TIME FRAME:
Contemporary (1992)

SUBJECTS:
Politics; Corruption; Oil production; Louisianan marshes; Conservation

LOCATION: Louisiana; Washington D. C.; New York
DEDICATION:
“To my reading committee:
Renee, my wife and unofficial editor;
My sisters, Beth Bryant and Wendy Grisham; my mother-in-law, Lib Jones; and my friend and co-conspirator, Bill Ballard”.
*ME Sweeeet!
SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From Chapter 2:
“Thomas Callahan was one of Tulane’s more popular professors, primarily because he refused to schedule classes before 11:00 A.M. He drank a lot, as did most of his students, and for him the first few hours of each morning were needed for sleep, then resuscitation. Nine and ten o’clock classes were abominations. He was also popular because he was cool—faded jeans, tweed jackets with well-worn elbow patches, no socks, no ties. The liberal-chic-academic look. He was forty-five, but with dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses he could pass for thirty-five, not that he gave a damn how old he looked. He shaved once a week, when it started itching; and when the wather was cool, which was seldom in New Orleans, he would grow a beard. He had a history of closeness with female students.
He was also popular because he taught constitutional law, a most unpopular course but a required one. Due to his sheer brilliance and coolness he actually made con law interesting. No one else at Tulane could do this. No one wanted to, really, so the students fought to sit in con law under Callahan at eleven, three mornings a week.”

RATING:.
5

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
7/1/2024- 7/6/2024 ( )

When this book begins, there is demonstrating outside the Supreme Court. All justices have been assigned 3 FBI protectors. Then two Supreme Court justices are murdered, Justice Abraham Rosenberg (91 years old with extreme opinions and waiting for a Democratic president so he can retire) and Justice Glenn Jensen (a homosexual). The FBI is tasked with discovering who has done this. France lets them know that an assassin named Khamel was seen getting off a plane in Paris just after the murder. Thomas Callahan is a law professor at Tulane University and teaches constitutional law. Darby Shaw is a second-year law student in that class and also Callahan's lover. Just after the two murders, she sets out to discover who could possibly have wanted them dead, based on the cases coming up to the Supreme Court from the courts of appeal. She thinks she has discovered a Louisiana case that could make it to the Supreme Court and have a much better chance of succeeding if the two murdered justices were replaced with two conservative justices. The case has to do with tapping the oil field within the costal wetlands owned by a very wealthy and violent recluse. Darby writes a brief describing the case and gives it to Callahan, although she says she no longer thinks it is a viable option. However, Callahan gives the brief to a friend of his in the FBI, Gavin Verheek, who sends it up the chain of command. It ends in the President's office and makes the President and his top aid, Fletcher Coal, very concerned since this man is a top donor. They name it the Pelican Brief, since the wetlands are the pelican's territory. Then more people are killed, the first being Thomas Callahan, who is blown up in his car after having dinner with Darby. She escaped because she refused to ride with him when he was drunk. This sets her on the run from whomever was responsible. The book details her escape and her collaboration with Gray Grantham, a top reporter from the Washington Post, to find evidence to support her Pelican Brief. They are chased around the US by the FBI, CIA, and the murders. ( )

I worked at a law firm where part of the movie was filmed. When Julia Roberts's character goes into a law firm to ask for a particular lawyer only to find out that he no longer works there and she leaves, that is my old firm. It is an ornate marble lobby with a small stream of water in the middle of the lobby. She goes through a glass door and can either go up an escalator or up some stairs to the reception desk, which overlooks the lobby. The walls are all glass and she can see across the floor into the conference room where the receptionist goes. I had just interviewed there before I saw the movie and was having major deja vu while watching the movie. ( )

(or maybe 4 stars) Excellent, total page-turner. With this one you can see why his books are such best-sellers / made into movies. I read one other (later?) one by him that was pretty awful, so if I ready his stuff again , I'll check reviews first (he's written a million.) I've heard him interviewed, he's obviously a smart guy. I'm guessing he write a book a year and some are "phoned in" or failed ideas. ( )

Ho-hum. The movie was better. ( )

Echoes of my father's influence in my taste in books. Good Memories. Been digging through the trunks of books selecting what I'm shipping across two continents to my new home, found so many by John Grisham, Robert Goddard and the rest of the Detective/Mystery Ratpack. Looking back, I was way too young to be reading any of my dad's books. Then again I was to young to be watching all his cop show Procedurals, this book is literally a core memory. ( )

One of the great Grisham stories, its engaging, evocative and fast paced. The author's expertise in the legal realm pushes the boundaries of this story. It's difficult not to enjoy his work if for no other reason than reader engagement. That said, this is on par with "The Firm" and others affording it appeal across all genres. ( )

“That fool has two nominations. That means eight of the nine will be Republican choices.”
“We won’t recognize the Constitution in ten years. This is sick.”
“Someone or some group wants a different Court, one with an absolute conservative majority.”
“He’ll nominate two Nazis.”

Are these quotes from the actions of the Trump administration? Nope, but they sure do read like it! This book was written in 1992, but it sure does feel timely!

Khamel is killing Supreme Court Justices, but why, and for whom? Could it be the President, who will be able to restructure the Court due to the assassinations? It's a good story, and for the first half or so, a real page turner! But it does run out of steam around then, and I became tired of the chasing-and-just-missing Darby Shaw plotline. I also started to not believe that her character was just not authentic, as she was just too good at evading the professional hitmen and planning out her every move perfectly. I started to wonder if it was going to be revealed that she had had some secret Jason Bourne training that just activated after she witnessed the car bomb. It felt that unreal.

Also, the friendship between Callahan and Verheek, and his relationship with Darby seems stiff and unnatural. And actually, all non-pelican brief dialogue felt stiff and hollow. It just didn't 'sound' like the way real people talk about everyday things. The legal and political dialogue read well, but not the run-of-the-mill stuff. Just my opinion.

In the end, I still think Trump did it. ( )

this was a former CAE set text, so i decided to make my students in the pre-CAE class read it -- mostly because i didn't want to read PD james' the lighthouse ever ever ever again. it was pretty much what i thought it would be, but worse because the "tension" was drawn out way too long, and the exciting climax included way too much typing. ( )

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Young college student dating her professor stumbles across a purported political plot and writes a theoretical brief. Well, when all hell breaks loose and she has to run for her life, you, the, reader, begins to figure out what is true. One of Graham's best, in my opinion. ( )

This 1990s classic brought Grisham to fame. While the book stands the test of time, the genre has lost its allure: the denouement comes too quickly and the legal action isn't captivating enough to keep the plot moving. The romance is formulaic, and the characters are superficial. Still, it makes for a nice travel read: the conspiracy is simple enough to stay engaged without being confusing. ( )

I haven't read this one in at least a decade, and I was happy at how well it stood up. Dated, of course, although not quite as badly as I expected. At one point Grantham ends a phone call and "puts the phone on the floor", which stopped me in my tracks for a moment, until I remembered: big landline phone. Some of the money numbers are hilarious, but not unexpected.

What's truly frightening is how many parallels can be drawn between Grisham's President and the orange wonder-douche currently squatting in the oval office. I know, I know, you can find parallels anywhere if you look hard enough, but honestly it doesn't take much effort to see that Grisham's clueless, blustering President, who cedes all authority to Fletcher Cole while spending most of his time in the Oval Office practicing his putting and wishing he was on the course, depressingly prescient.

As for plotting, I still hold this one as one of the most intricately plotted books I've ever read. I don't mean Darby's story, but the conspiracy that Darby uncovers - as many times as I've read this, it never gets old, never fails to enthral me. The plotting goes a long way towards making up any inadequacies in the writing itself (if Darby told anyone, one more time, about how much she'd survived to date, I thought I might shoot her myself).

Still a good read! ( )

The Pelican Brief is an intriguing and brilliant political thriller that demands the reader’s attention from the first sentence to the last. It begins with the assassination of two liberal Supreme Court justices in one night. Everyone in Washington, including the White House, is left reeling and speculating whose responsible. While the FBI, CIA, and DCPD investigate, a diligent law student, Darby Shaw, becomes obsessed with solving the crime and writes her findings in a document she titles The Pelican Brief. Shortly after sharing the brief with her boyfriend, Professor Callahan, who gets killed by a car bomb, Darby runs for her life in a suspenseful cat-and-mouse game of conspiracy and murder. Having already seen the movie starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington—which was excellent, by the way—I thought reading the book might be boring since I was already familiar with the plot, but I couldn’t be more wrong. Once I began, I had to devour it as quickly as possible. John Grisham can certainly write! ( )

Supreme Court Justices are murdered on the same night. A law student has a wild theory of who did it and now they're after her.

The Pelican Brief by John Grisham (1993)

After reading other reviews it is understandable that this book would cause a wide spectrum of feelings and comments. Yes it is a dated plot have been written over 20 years ago even though it is even today timely. Yes there is some what of a formulaic plot. Yes there were slow parts. And yes some of the characters were a little transparent. However given a plot involving government, what happens behind closed doors, internal governmental conflicts and implications wrought by selfishly driven political contributions it is to be expected. It is aggravating to have a heroin that is every mans fantasy (super intelligent, beautiful, sexy, cunning and sexually desirable) as it seems trite for this story but I have yet to read the perfect book so accept it for what it is; a very good story that makes a reader feel satisfied when they are through reading the book. What is more important is how well the story was written and how it pulled the reader in. To me this is one of the best novels Grisham has written for all it warts and short comings. ( )

Whilst I was a little disappointed at the lack of legal focus in this book, it more than made up for this with its excellent structure and thrills.

Essentially, a young law student floats the idea of a conspiracy behind the murder of two supreme court judges, after discarding the theory herself as too far fetched to be possible she gives it to her professor (and lover) to read, it makes its way to the FBI who then wanting to ruffle some feathers in the Whitehouse pass it up the chain. Somewhere a long the line it passes the eyes of people involved and they decide the only way to get on top of things is to kill the professor and the student, using a car bomb they manage to kill the professor and in doing so confirm that the far fetched idea is actually real beginning a series of political & law enforcement maneuverings whilst the young law student runs for her life.

Overall, it's an excellent thriller mainly focused on the student fleeing for her life, the conspiracy & cover up actions. There's next to no legal proceedings and no real courtroom action, but it's still a good book, just not that sort of book. ( )

A reasonable legal thriller, but a bit inconsistently paced - one moment we're breathlessly following along the action flipping pages to see what's about to happen, and then next we're slogging through a dozen pages of dry political machinations.

My biggest criticism of this book was the casual sexism. Perhaps a sign of the fact that the world is a different place in 2020 as I write this, than it was in 1992 when this book was written, but I found it tiresome that the main protagonist is not only portrayed as a stunningly beautiful young woman, but that we're reminded constantly of it - almost literally every single man she meets is mentioned as admiring her physical appearance. Again and again and again.

All of this for little in the end, as the great earth-shattering conspiracy turns out to be a little weak, and the climax isn't particularly satisfying. ( )

Probably my favorite Grisham... ( )

My favorite Grisham, so far. I couldn't put it down. Now I want to find the DVD and see how good a job they did. ( )

Interesting legal thriller from the man that created the genre. I truly hope that there are not evil rich people out there that just hire assassins to take out people that are in the way. I loved the main character, a very smart female law student that actually figures out why two Supreme Court judges were murdered. Very fast action and of course, I learned more about the law along the way. ( )

Love this book! ( )

The best of Grisham, and still my favourite. The bad guys don't entirely get their comeuppance but there is a reasonably satisfying denouement. ( )