When I first heard about Camino Ghosts, Grisham's latest novel, I wasn't sure I'd like it, because it didn't sound like a legal thriller. The interviews I'd heard with Grisham talking about the book emphasized the premise of a 300-year-old colony of freed, escaped, and shipwrecked slaves and their descendants on an island off the north Florida coast.
Nevertheless, it is a legal thriller, because a corporate developer wants to build a resort and casino on Dark Isle. All they need to go forward is to purchase the island from the state of Florida. But the last remaining former inhabitant, Lovely Jackson, who left the island in 1955, claims she is its rightful owner, and is determined to stop the project.
Camino Ghosts is the third Grisham novel set on Camino Island, and some of the characters will be familiar to readers of either of the first two books. Mercer Mann, an author, commits to writing the story of Dark Isle's past (based on a memoir written by Lovely) and chronicling the efforts to save the island from development. The bookstore owner, Bruce Cable, facilitates her meetings with Lovely.
SPOILER ALERT! I am going to try not to give too much away, but if you'd rather not know anything more about the story before you read it, close this window now.
One subplot is that a couple hundred years earlier, Lovely's great-great-great-great-grandmother, Nalla, an African priestess, put a protective curse on the island: any white person setting foot on the island would die.
The developers hire an advance team and send it to the island to scout it out. They are to look for traces of an historic slave settlement on the island, and if they find any, to destroy them.
The team has a difficult time of it. The island is overgrown, but many trees had fallen during Hurricane Leo a few years earlier, so it is hard to make progress through the forests. There are aggressive rattlesnakes and panthers. Their communications systems fail. When they finally return to the mainland, they report that they did not find any dwellings or structures. They go their own ways, and they each get sick and die. Their deaths are not reported to the developers.
The remainder of the book deals with the efforts of an environmental pro bono lawyer from the Barrier Island Legal Defense Fund to block the developers from starting their project.
I loved most of this book, but I have two criticisms. I almost wish the developers had started their project, and then fallen victim to the curse. I think that would have made for a great story.
Also, toward the end of the book, a young woman who assisted the lawyer as a volunteer starts the Nalla Foundation and raises mucho bucks to preserve and honor the memories of the freed Africans who settled on Dark Isle and could never go home. Her fundraising success seems unrealistically easy.
Even with those caveats, I enjoyed the book immensely and recommend it to legal thriller fans.
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