Grisham summonses greed

The Summonsby John GrishamCentury, 16.99Neil Rose

After a brief literary sojourn outside the legal profession, John Grisham returns to what he knows best in The Summons.

And what he knows about best is not simply lawyers, but greedy lawyers.

And for Grisham aficionados, he has also returned to Clanton, Mississippi, the setting for the exciting A Time to Kill, which was the first book he wrote but was not published until after The Firm.

Freshly divorced 43-year-old law professor Ray Atlee is summoned back home to Clanton by his dying father to discuss his estate.

Judge Reuben Atlee is known across the county for his scrupulous fairness and generosity, but that has never extended to his sons, Ray and Forrest.

Despite his ambivalence towards his father, Ray arrives when requested only to discover the old man dead and $3 million in used notes stuffed in a cupboard.

Shocked and confused, Ray hides the money while trying to work out where it could have come from.

But it soon becomes apparent that somebody else knows his secret.

Ray's slow descent from a regular, decent guy into a man looking for ways to salt away the cash without anyone - including his brother - knowing, is charted well enough, while more overt greed comes in the shape of an amoral lawyer who has become obscenely rich on the back of mass-tort actions.

As a result, The Summons is less of a victory of plot over character as is the Grisham style, but it does keep the pages turning before an ending which this reader, at least, did not see coming.

But this is not a story that rocks along like a true thriller (unlike, it must be said, A Time to Kill).

If nothing else, Ray spends too much time travelling, watching his money and trying not to fall asleep in case anyone steals it, while suffering standard movie-style intimidation from an unseen foe.

The feeling persists that the life has gone out of John Grisham's writing; recent books, while crafted well enough, have failed to sustain the pace and excitement of his earlier novels.

There are, without doubt, other seams he has yet to expose in the mine of greedy lawyers, but perhaps it is time for a longer sojourn away from it.