The pelican brief

Resource Information

The work The pelican brief represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Chemeketa Cooperative Regional Library Service (CCRLS). This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.
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The Resource The pelican brief

Label: The pelican brief

Statement of responsibility: John Grisham

Creator

trueGrisham, John

Subject

Genre

Language: eng

Summary: Two Supreme Court justices, one liberal and one conservative, are assassinated in one night. The country is stunned and baffled; the FBI has no clues. But Darby Shaw, a brilliant law student at Tulane, thinks she has the answer. Days of digging in the law library's computers have led her to an obscure connection between the two justices. She fleshes out her beliefs in a meticulous though wildly speculative brief that builds a strong case against a most unlikely suspect. But her suspect has powerful friends. One evening, outside a New Orleans restaurant, she narrowly escapes an assassin's car bomb. Someone has read her brief. Someone who wants her dead. She contacts investigative reporter Gary Grantham and convinces him that she's onto the biggest cover-up since Watergate. Together they go underground, trying to survive long enough to expose the real truth.--Adapted from dust jacket

Storyline

truePlot-driven

Pace

trueFast-paced

Tone

Writing style

trueCompelling

Review

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)) -- Ray Olson
Magill Book Review: The shocking news that two Supreme Court justices have been brutally murdered is baffling to both the White House and the F.B.I.. The president, a conservative Republican, senses that there may be a political connection to his administration that could be damaging to his reelection bid. And he wants answers. But the FBI fails to establish a motive or come up with a credible list of suspects. Meanwhile in New Orleans, Darby Shaw, a Tulane law student, notes the timing of the murders and suspects that there may be a plot to pack the Court with conservatives. What is puzzling, however, is how dissimilar the murdered justices were. One was a ninety-year-old liberal patriarch of the Court, the other a young conservative justice. After reviewing hundreds of cases which are scheduled to be heard by the Court, she finally discovers one that may contain an issue volatile enough to result in the killings. Darby writes a brief based on her research which reveals a surprising link between the two murdered justices. It seems that a case pending before the court involves an attempt by a businessman to secure access to an oil deposit found in the middle of a Louisiana marshland. This marshland is the home of the brown pelican, a bird which is on the Federal endangered species list. Darby's brief ends up being passed to the White House, the FBI and the CIA. Shortly thereafter, her law professor boyfriend is killed in a car-bombing meant to eliminate them both. Darby's narrow escape makes her realize she is a marked woman. Desperate, she contacts a WASHINGTON POST reporter and together they work to develop a story which will expose the killers. Going underground to avoid her pursuers, Darby flees first to Baton Rouge, then to Chicago and New York. On the way she and the reporter discover the truth and, need it be said, each other. John Grisham's THE FIRM (Doubleday) stayed on the NEW YORK TIMES best-seller list longer than any other work of fiction in 1991 and established him as a writer capable of unreeling a fairly decent yarn about the sleazy dealings of lawyers. A former attorney himself, Grisham is familiar enough with the legal world to write convincingly of lawyers, guns, and money. THE PELICAN BRIEF should stand up well alongside his first best-seller and further satisfy demand for the upscale whodunit. -- Essay by Francis Poole.
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.)
/* Starred Review */ 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 Derby 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 kilt off the state's beloved but endangered brown pelican. Derby'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 Derby'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. (Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 1992)

Cataloging source: DLC

Dewey number: 813/.54

Index: no index present

Interest level: Middle Grade

LC call number: PS3557.R5355

LC item number: P4 1992

Literary form: fiction

NLM call number: PS3557.R5355

NLM item number: P384 1992

Reading level: 6.8

Study program name: Accelerated Reader

Context

Context of The pelican brief

Context

Work of