Book info

• Title The Pelican Brief
• Author John Grisham
• Year 1992
• Genre Thriller

Two Supreme Court Justices are dead, their murders unsolved. But one woman might have found the answer - if she can live to tell it. 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 bombing. 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.

Thoughts

Darby Shaw is meant to be your average, ordinary law student. Except for the bit where she’s beautiful, extremely intelligent and sleeping with her professor. She writes an insightful brief connecting two murders together, but the document causes all manner of trouble.

I was flabbergasted at how clever Darby was. At all stages, she was outwitting the people who were trying to track her down, all while going through her own stages of grief. There’s no reason she shouldn’t be that smart, except that she’s painted as an average Joe(sephine). She teams up with Gray Grantham, a journalist, and we get some excellent dialogue between the two.

Mixed up with the smart conversation are plenty of descriptions, intrigue and thrills. Each chapter, each page, makes you want to read onwards. I felt like I wanted to know more about what Darby was doing as she was doing it, but that lack of information helped the mystery of whether she would be successful in the end or not. I may be alone in wanting to know about her actually chopping off the beloved hair and dying it a different colour.

Rating: 3 / 5