Camino Island had a good premise that made me decide to grab it from the library. Five of F. Scott Fitzgerald's original manuscripts are stolen from Princeton and enter the black market. Is this a mystery involving books? I'm in. And a good deal of this takes place on an island in Florida at a book store? Yep yep!
I'm sad to say I didn't enjoy this as much as I hoped. I read til the end and was really not happy with the ending at all. It started well with the theft. The men involved in the theft could have really carried the book, but *spoiler* the FBI stepped in way too quick and took nearly all of them out of play. What? Where is my mystery??
Enter a mysterious woman named Elaine who is trying to hire Mercer Mann, a "writer", to go to Camino Island and live in her dead grandma's house. Elaine wants Mercer to infiltrate Bruce Cable's life and bookstore to find the manuscripts.
WTF?
Mercer is barely a writer. I couldn't stand her character and, frankly, she spent too much time "admiring her body" in the mirror and whining about her inability to write. Cable was an interesting enough character to follow so that gave me something to hope for but in the end, I was very disappointed with him and his actions. Hardly the stuff of a shady book dealer. Denny, one of the thieves, was a violent asshole who never got to shine before a convenient FBI person arrested him and threw him out of the picture. Who were we supposed to be enticed by here? Surely not Mercer.
Alas, I think we were supposed to like the whiny wannabe writer (heeey, alliteration!). The end of the book wrapped everything up in one extremely tidy bow that I disliked.
If I hear Grisham is putting out a new legal thriller, I'm in. Everything else, I'm out.
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