To Whom It May Concern

Book Review: The Broker by John Grisham

This book begins during the waning hours of the presidency, as an ousted president makes several very controversial pardons, one being Joel Backman, a major power broker who was sent to prison after pleading guilty to theft of military secrets. Turns out that the CIA pressured the president into making the pardon, then quickly secreted him out of the country to Italy, where they would release his whereabouts to several other countries, who are very intent upon killing him.

The book started off rather well, but upon Backman’s arrival in Italy, things slowed down too much to really keep a person occupied with the novel. The main problem was the daily Italian life that Backman was leading was drawn out much too far and became relatively boring. Certainly Bologna, Italy is likely a wonderful city, but it seemed like Backman went to every café and little restaurant in the city, and Grisham had to write in detail about every one of them, and also about every single day’s Italian language lessons that Backman was taking. It was all a little too boring for my tastes, and you ended up wanting to skip ahead to find out just what was going to happen.

In the end, Backman has a moral dilemma, does he sell the technology that he has or does he do the moral thing and give it up to his own government, despite the fact that part of his own government wanted to see him killed. I was disappointed with the ending because there were many ways that Backman could have made a great variety of people pay for their greed and treachery, yet Grisham sort of ended the book without any of that being done, there are far too many loose ends in my opinion to really slam the book shut and think to yourself “what a great ending”. It was a little change in pace from Grisham’s usual works, and an interesting yarn, but had too much filler in the middle and too little substance in the end.

Rating: ***