The pelican brief / John Grisham.
Record details
- ISBN: 0385423543 (lg. print) :
- ISBN: 0385421982 :
- Physical Description: 371 p. ; 24 cm.
- Edition: 1st ed.
- Publisher: New York : Doubleday, c1992.
Content descriptions
Target Audience Note: | Adult |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | United States. Supreme Court > Fiction. Large type books. |
Genre: | Mystery fiction. Legal stories. |
Available copies
- 49 of 50 copies available at Bibliomation. (Show)
- 1 of 1 copy available at Hall Memorial Library - Ellington.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 50 total copies.
Other Formats and Editions
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Hall Memorial Library - Ellington | GRISHAM, JOHN (Text) | 34037067187429 | Adult Fiction | Available | - |
Electronic resources
Publishers Weekly Review
The Pelican Brief
Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
In this tale of the aftermath of the assassinations of two Supreme Court justices, Grisham delivers a suspenseful plot at a breakneck pace, although his characters are stereotypes. The hardcover was on the PW bestseller list 48 weeks and the mass market was No. 1 last week. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
BookList Review
The Pelican Brief
Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Lawyers are supposed to be able to write well. An attorney who thought better of it, Grisham demonstrated in The Firm that he writes well enough to reach the best-seller list. His new thriller stars a lawyer--well, okay, just a wannabe lawyer, a student--who discovers some other lawyers' sleazy doings and then has to run for dear life from their wrath. Smart, gorgeous Darby Shaw stumbles across the motive and the man behind the assassinations of two Supreme Court justices. Almost immediately afterward, she's nearly killed in a car bombing, and those to whom she imparts her knowledge start dropping like the proverbial winged sextapeds. She finally gets reliable help from a Washington Post reporter who rightly intuits that at least some blame for the murderous shenanigans can be found in the Oval Office. Heads will roll when the truth comes out. Until then, Darby and her scribbler have to keep their own noggins on their necks. An exciting read even if the President, the two ill-fated justices, the White House chief of staff, the wealthy mastermind of the assassins, and other powerful supporting players are cartoonishly ruthless, amoral, and lowbrow. Are those in high places really this repugnant? (Reviewed Jan. 15, 1992)0385421982Ray Olson
Kirkus Review
The Pelican Brief
Kirkus Reviews
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Gripping legal suspenser by the author of last year's hallucinatory The Firm--and an even stronger performance than that still-current bestseller. Grisham also strikes gold with public awareness of the furor over the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Thomas. Where The Firm clamped into the reader's greed for the perks of a supersuccessful young lawyer in an almost fantasy law firm, Grisham's second is a tale that baits its own hooks with the lures of All the President's Men. That much of what happens here happens regularly in suspense novels (sudden stranglings and murders) in no way lessens the novel's intensity and feeling of freshness--a freshness that springs in both novels from Grisham's focus on top law students, cloistered brains who find themselves raw beginners in the real world but afloat on cash. Here, second-year law student at Tulane Darby Shaw sets out to solve the seemingly motiveless simultaneous murders of two largely liberal Supreme Court judges who were killed two hours apart on the same night. A lone assassin or a conspiracy? Clearly someone wants the conservative Republican president, a grandfatherly nerd mainly interested in his golf game, to pack the already conservative Court. Darby reviews hundreds of the Court's upcoming cases and sees only one that fulfills the breadth of evil needed to account for such desperate measures as double murder: a multibillion-dollar oil venture in Louisiana that will kill off the state's beloved but endangered brown pelican. Darby's brief on this ``fictional'' case finds its way to the White House, the FBI, and the CIA. Then Darby's lover, her constitutional-law professor, to whom she has shown the brief, is blown up in a car-bomb explosion meant also to have killed Darby. The story's vitality springs from Grisham's relentless enlivening of Darby's fears as she flees about the country in a closing web of killers while trying to help Washington Post reporter Gray Grantham get the goods on the baddies in a newsbreak bigger than Watergate. Must entertainment for legal folk. Should outsell The Firm. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for May)