The Pelican Brief by John Grisham (Audiobook Review)

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Title: The Pelican Brief
Author: John Grisham
Narrator: Alexander Adams
Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio
Duration: 11 hours, 32 minutes
Copyright: 1992
Genres: legal, suspense, thriller
Filed in: Audiobook Reviews
Review copy provided by Kearney Public Library.

PUBLISHER’S SUMMARY: Late one October night, Justice Abe Rosenberg, at 91 the Supreme Court's liberal legend, is shot to death in his Georgetown home. Two hours later Glenn Jensen, the Court's youngest and most conservative justice, is strangled. The country is stunned; the FBI has no clues. But Darby Shaw, a brilliant law student at Tulane, thinks she has the answer. Days of digging through the law library's computers have led her to draft a brief speculating on an obscure connection between the 2 justices - and a most unlikely suspect. Her suspect has powerful friends: one evening, outside a New Orleans restaurant, Darby narrowly escapes an assassin's car bomb. Someone has read her brief - someone who wants her dead. Alone and frightened, Darby disappears into the anonymous shadows of the French Quarter, where she contacts investigative reporter Gray Grantham and convinces him that Washington's position on the killings amounts to the biggest cover-up since Watergate. Together they go underground, on the run, trying to stay alive long enough to expose the real truth contained in the Pelican Brief.
©1992 John Grisham; (P)1992 Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing

MY TAKE ON IT: “The Pelican Brief” is not my favorite John Grisham audiobook. I like his stories about young, hot-shot lawyers going up against multi-million dollar insurance companies and things like that. Instead, “The Pelican Brief” is about a law student who has to go on the run after inadvertently identifying the guilty parties in a high-profile assassination. It’s not a bad story idea, but I don’t think Grisham pulled it off.
The law student, Darby Shaw, is primarily interested in constitutional law, and therefore takes notice when two supreme court justices are murdered. I can believe that. Darby is not just smart, she is very smart, so she studies the cases that the two justices have ruled on recently, as well as cases that are coming up soon, and cross references that data with people who might want to change the outcomes of those cases. She writes this all up in a report, one of her teachers hands it off to a friend of his who works for the FBI, and the next thing you know, the teacher is dead and Darby is running for her life. This is the stuff that action-thrillers are made of, and I’m down with it.
It’s downhill from there. Darby stays alive because the professional killers who took out two supreme court justices are too stupid to track her down. Darby is smart so she does a lot of things right: she doesn’t go home, she changes hotels every other day, buys new clothes just as frequently, and cuts and colors her hair. Grisham explained that she has a lot of money from an inheritance, so that’s okay, but she goes around using her credit cards, which any idiot would know not to do. She eventually realizes her mistake and starts using cash, but drawing cash from a bank would leave a trail just as surely as using credit cards. Still, the killers can’t seem to find her. At one point they are examining a photo of Darby sporting her new hairdo, and I couldn’t help but wonder why they could shoot her with a camera so easily, but not with a gun.
I dunno, maybe I’m just over-analyzing, but I don’t like books where the hero stays alive only because the bad guys are stupid. I’ve read a few John Grisham novels, and I know he can do better than this.

NARRATOR: I wasn’t very impressed with Alexander Adams’ narration of “The Pelican Brief.” He left unusually long pauses between sentences, and he just never developed any kind of rhythm or flow. The overall effect was a stilted and unnatural reading. Adams does try to use different voices for the characters and I give him credit for that, but again, they just sound unnatural and awkward. I looked around at Audible and found some different recordings of this audiobook, so I would recommend trying one with a different narrator.

FINAL WORD: “The Pelican Brief” isn’t a bad audiobook, but it’s definitely not Grisham’s best work. Couple that with a mediocre narration and I would have to say try some of Grisham’s other audiobooks before attempting this one.

FILM ADAPTATION: The Pelican Brief was adapted to film in 1993 and starred Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. I haven’t seen this one yet, but Denzel and Julia are extremely talented actors. The film grossed about $195 million so I guess a lot of people liked it.

CHECK OUT THESE OTHER AUDIOBOOK REVIEWS:
A Time to Kill by John Grisham (Audiobook Review)
The Firm by John Grisham (Audiobook Review)
The Rainmaker by John Grisham (Audiobook Review)

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This audiobook review is based on the unabridged audiobook.
Audiobook review by Steven Brandt
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