A great read if you are into heists, page-turners, and multi-plotline stories!
Camino Island by John Grisham is not part of a series and was published four years ago, in the middle of 2017, so it is relatively new.
Five members of a gang work together to plan and execute a heist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s manuscripts for some of his most well-known stories, such as The Great Gatsby. Hiding in the library of Princeton University, the manuscripts are stolen by the thieves but after leaving one vital clue in the library, the FBI tracks down the manuscripts and eventually lands up in Florida. At the same time as these thieves are stealing precious manuscripts and selling them for millions, a bookshop owner in Florida gets together with a group of writers, one of who is an undercover FBI agent, checking out the bookshop owner suspected of holding the manuscripts. Eventually, the two stories converge with the thieves finding the bookshop and getting the manuscripts back.
I believe Camino Island was an above-average novel, but not the most exciting book I have ever read. Some parts of the novel get a bit dry, where Grisham is describing scenes with long, drawn-out sentences and many, many details about a scene I can picture clearly. However, this is made up for with the action scenes and suspense coming from the heist plot. The dry sections (different plot from the heist) do complement the heist plotline well, where the pace of the novel switches back and forth between fast and slow with each different plot. One piece of the novel I believe was not clarified fully was the ending, where there were many loose strings that were not tied up well by Grisham. Many of the characters and situations were left open-ended from earlier in the novel, making it feel quite incomplete, although this may be Grisham’s intent: the reader can create his own story. Even though the story did not have the best conclusion, Grisham’s language and style throughout the entire novel definitely help the reader imagine that they are in the character’s perspective. A lesson Grisham ends with is that friendships are a key part of life, an idea which I highly support. I especially like how Grisham conveys this by contrasting what happens to one of the thieves when he is on his own with what happens to the main character of the writers’ plotline when she is surrounded by people who can and want to help her.
After all the ups and downs of the novel, Grisham’s work is still a great read and people who do not like heist novels will probably not enjoy it, but I personally enjoyed the page-turning experience Camino Island has to offer.
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