The Pelican Brief

By John Grisham,

Book cover of The Pelican Brief

Book description

_______________________________________
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…

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Why read it?

3 authors picked The Pelican Brief as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

The best aspect to love about this book is that a curious twenty-four-year-old law student not only does what others couldn’t do, solve the murders of two Supreme Court justices, but her doing so manages to put one of the world’s richest men on the run from federal officers and keep the president from running for reelection.

Grisham finds a way to give hope to all the amateur sleuths and conspiracy theorists in the world that they can crack the code that elite professionals who are trained to do so somehow cannot.

I devoured all of Grisham’s books as they came out. The legal thrillers make studying the law extremely fascinating. The Pelican Brief is still one of my favorites because of my own love of New Orleans, the environment, and how I saw myself as a passionate environmentalist at one time. The Pelican Brief shows us how intertwined law, land use, the environment, and murder can be. We see how a young woman with a curious mind can see patterns that others have not and the lengths she has to go to to find justice.

In many ways, this was the thriller that started it all for me.

Perhaps technically a legal thriller, the political dimension shines through in the shadowy forces tailing the fearless and unlikely heroine of legal student Darby Shaw as she uncovers a huge political scandal involving the US Supreme Court.

Its conspiracies may seem tame by modern standards, but for a fledgling writer trying to figure out what kind of stories he wanted to tell, this was thrilling and addictive stuff.

Grisham’s easy style appears effortless, but there’s true craft behind each chase, each plot twist, and each conversation. This…

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Pete West, a political columnist, travels to Prague to find a missing diplomat, later found murdered. He attempts to discover more about a cryptic note received from the diplomat and is immediately entangled in the secret Bilderberg Club’s strategy to form a world federation.

Pete meets a Czechian agent who…

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