David

Grisham's legal novels have come to be standard fare on my reading menu, when they come around every year or so. I expect a well laid out story with impeccable use of language throughout. Not too exciting, not too complicated, and generally not too many surprises. This story fall right into step with many of his others. However, it is written well enough that it engages the reader and certainly was not a waste of time. I listened to this book while travelling for about 12 hours and it filled the time nicely. Nothing too memorable in the long term, but certainly an entertaining read/listen.

A really long convoluted way to put yourself to sleep. The story jumps around, strays away, gets into intimate detail about situations, then leaves the reader wondering why the heck they were given so much detail as it isn't threaded back into the story again. I found it a great cure for insomnia several times. I was quite disappointed after being fairly pleased with the first book in this series.

I've always enjoyed Crichton's work. He generally winds a web that's easy to get caught up in, and hard to put down. In this book, however, I'm finding it elementary in its sentence and structure, stumbling in its plot line and generally not as professional as his other works.

I can only assume this was a first draft novel that he wrote before his death and it hasn't gone through the editorial rigours that his other books have before publication. Perhaps I should be thinking of this as getting closer to the author's original work, but I'm just finding it distracting from the story itself, and I'm having trouble finishing it.