The Pelican Brief

by John Grisham

Two Supreme Court Justices are dead, their murders unsolved.
But one woman might have found the answer.

Darby Shaw is a brilliant New Orleans legal student with a sharp political mind. For her own amusement, she draws up a legal brief showing how the judges might have been murdered for political reasons, and shows it to her professor. He shows it to his friend, an FBI lawyer.

Then the professor dies in a car bomb.

And Darby realises that her brief, which pointed to a vast presidential conspiracy, might be right. Someone is intent on silencing Darby for good - somebody who will stop at nothing to preserve the secrets of the Pelican Brief...

• ISBN10: 0099993805
• ISBN13: 9780099993803
• Publish Date: 3 June 1993 (first published 1 January 1992)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 17 March 2017
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Cornerstone
• Imprint: Arrow Books Ltd
• Edition: Revised ed.
• Format: Paperback (A-Format (178x111 mm))
• Pages: 432
• Language: English

Reviews

[MurderByDeath]

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!