Camino Island by John GrishamFi
Published: Published June 6th 2017 by Doubleday
Genre: Fiction, mystery, thriller
Pages: 290

Five priceless manuscripts are stolen from Princeton university and vanishes into the black market.

Mercer is a young writer who is suffering from some serious writers block when she is approached by a mysterious company looking into Bruce – a bookdealer on Camino Island where Mercer has ties through a grandmother who used to live there. She is offered a lot of money to go undercover to get intel on Bruce and his network.

This sounds exciting, and as a book lover, the fact that it’s a thriller about books just makes everything more appealing. (I mean, doesn’t it?) I wish I could take a tour in a vault full of first editions, but something tells me this is as far as I’ll ever get.

It’s clever really, targeting the bookish audience, and yet there’s something missing. Maybe it’s the genre. Maybe I was expecting a very exciting novel, and this wasn’t exciting, at least not to me. It was a slow anticlimactic read, that I somehow still liked, but felt a little removed from. Maybe it was the omniscient narrator that created a barrier for me.

There were also threads of the story that led to nothing. And I am left with questions, and I don’t particularly like it when things are left unexamined or unanswered. Like Mercer’s grandmother and her young lover. The grandmother washed up at shore one day, while the young lover vanished at sea and was never found again. I was waiting for that to carry some weight, but it never really took off.

There were many other scenarios where I felt something was up, but then it wasn’t. I was left with a “that’s it?” kind of feeling. And honestly, it took me a while to read cause I kept falling asleep. It wasn’t the “this book will keep you up all night” kind…

I don’t know what else to say, it was ok, I liked it well enough, but it didn’t wow me.