The ending is abrupt. I knew I was coming to end of audiobook and story did not seem to be wrapping up. I was afraid that I was missing parts of the audiobook. But then it ended. ( )

The Brethren by John Grisham

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
--Print: COPYRIGHT ©: 2/1/2000; ISBN: 9780385497466; PUBLISHER: Doubleday (Random House); PAGES: 366; UNABRIDGED; (Info from Amazon.com)
--Digital: ©: March 9, 2010; ISBN: 9780307575975; PUBLISHER: Vintage; PAGES: 465; Unabridged (Info from Amazon.com)
--(this version)*Audio: COPYRIGHT ©: 1/31/2000; ISBN: 9780553753684; PUBLISHER: Random House Audio; DURATION: 11: hrs, 34 min; Unabridged; (Info from Amazon)

Feature Film or tv: Not that I am aware of.

SERIES: No

MAIN CHARACTERS: (Not comprehensive, and spelling could be wrong)
Teddy Maynard – Orchestrator of presidential campaign
Aaron Lake – Aspiring politician

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
SELECTED: This was the next of the Grisham novels, if following chronologically.
ABOUT: Incarcerated judges playing "court" with fellow inmates, which helps the inmates with their legal issues, settles current disputes among the inmates, and keeps the judges busy. But a bigger interest is a scam they’ve set up using a crooked lawyer on the outside.

OVERALL IMPRESSION: As previously mentioned, Grisham always comes up with interesting, unique tales.

AUTHOR:
John Grisham: (From Wikipedia)
“Grisham, the second of five children, was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Wanda (née Skidmore) and John Ray Grisham.[6] His father was a construction worker and a cotton farmer, and his mother was a homemaker.[9] When Grisham was four years old, his family settled in Southaven, Mississippi, a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee.[6]
As a child, he wanted to be a baseball player.[8] As noted in the foreword to Calico Joe, Grisham gave up playing baseball at the age of 18, after a game in which a pitcher aimed a beanball at him, and narrowly missed doing the young Grisham grave harm.
Although Grisham's parents lacked formal education, his mother encouraged him to read and prepare for college.[1] He drew on his childhood experiences for his novel A Painted House.[6] Grisham started working for a plant nursery as a teenager, watering bushes for $1.00 an hour. He was soon promoted to a fence crew for $1.50 an hour. He wrote about the job: "there was no future in it". At 16, Grisham took a job with a plumbing contractor but says he "never drew inspiration from that miserable work".[10]
Through one of his father's contacts, he managed to find work on a highway asphalt crew in Mississippi at age 17. It was during this time that an unfortunate incident got him "serious" about college. A fight with gunfire broke out among the crew causing Grisham to run to a nearby restroom to find safety. He did not come out until after the police had detained the perpetrators. He hitchhiked home and started thinking about college. His next work was in retail, as a salesclerk in a department store men's underwear section, which he described as "humiliating". By this time, Grisham was halfway through college. Planning to become a tax lawyer, he was soon overcome by "the complexity and lunacy" of it. He decided to return to his hometown as a trial lawyer.[11]
He attended the Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi and later attended Delta State University in Cleveland.[6] Grisham changed colleges three times before completing a degree.[1] He eventually graduated from Mississippi State University in 1977, receiving a B.S. degree in accounting. He later enrolled in the University of Mississippi School of Law to become a tax lawyer, but his interest shifted to general civil litigation. He graduated in 1981 with a J.D. degree.[6]
After leaving law school, he participated in some missionary work in Brazil, under the First Baptist Church of Oxford.[12]”

NARRATOR:
Frank Muller- From Wikipedia:
“Frank Muller (May 5, 1951 – June 4, 2008) was a stage and television actor, but was most famous as an audiobook narrator.
Early life
Muller was born in the Netherlands, the eldest of five children. His family immigrated to the United States when he was five.
Career
Muller was a classically trained actor who began his career working on stage and doing commercials. He spent many years on the New York stage, where he became a company member of the Riverside Shakespeare Company, for which he played the title role in King Henry V, Edmund the Bastard in The History of King Lear, and the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac, as well as performing with the Roundabout Theater Company and the New York Shakespeare Festival among others. He also played supporting roles on television in shows like Law & Order, Life Goes On, Harry and the Hendersons, and All My Children.[1]
It is as an audiobook narrator, however, that he was most famous. In 1979, Henry Trentman founded Recorded Books and hired Muller as its first narrator to record its first book, The Sea Wolf by Jack London.[2][3][4] The company began by publishing audiobook recordings of public domain works such as Call of the Wild and A Tale of Two Cities but later expanded into copyrighted works as audiobooks began to grow in popularity. Muller soon became the narrator of choice for such authors as Stephen King, John le Carré, John Grisham, Elmore Leonard and many others. Muller won the 2002 and 2003 Audie Award for Best Male Narrator for his readings of Clive Barker's Coldheart Canyon and Elmore Leonard's Tishomingo Blues, respectively.”
*Frank was an excellent narrator. I just finished listening to a book narrated by Norm Diez who’d mentioned in an AudioFile interview that he’d started out at Recorded Books with Frank, and I’ve begun another Grisham book, also narrated by Frank, so I was feeling a bit like I knew the fellow, and was so sad to learn from this Wikipedia entry that he had a motorcycle accident in 2003, and convalesced until he passed in 2008. So tragic.

GENRE:
Fiction; Legal Thriller, Crime

TIME FRAME:
Contemporary (2000)

SUBJECTS:
Scams; Politicians; Judges; Prison; LGBTQ

LOCATION: Florida

DEDICATION:
I didn’t find one.
SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From Chapter Two:
“Though he’d served in Congress for fourteen years, Aaron Lake still drove his own car around Washington. He didn’t need or want a chauffeur, or an aide, or a bodyguard. Sometimes an intern would ride with him and take notes, but for the most part Lake enjoyed the tranquillity of sitting in D.C. traffic while listening to classical guitar on the stereo. Many of his friends, especially those who’d achieved the status of a Mr. Chairman or a Mr. Vice Chairman, had larger cars with drivers. Some even had limos
Not Lake. It was a waste of time and money and privacy. If he ever sought higher office, he certainly didn’t want the baggage of a chauffeur wrapped around his neck. Besides, he enjoyed being alone. His office was a madhouse. He had fifteen people bouncing off the walls, answering phones, opening files, serving the folks back in Arizona who’d sent him to Washington. Two more did nothing but raise money. Three interns managed to further clog his narrow corridors and take up more time than they deserved.
He was single, a widower, with a quaint little townhouse in Georgetown that he was very fond of. He lived quietly, occasionally stepping into the social scene that had attracted him and his late wife in the early years.
He followed the Beltway, the traffic slow and cautious because of a light snow. He was quickly cleared through CIA security at Langley, and was very pleased to see a preferred parking space waiting for him, along with two plainclothes security personnel.
“Mr. Maynard is waiting,” one of them said gravely, opening his car door while the other took his briefcase. Power did have its perks.
Lake had never met with the CIA director at Langley. They’d conferred twice on the Hill, years earlier, back when the poor guy could get around. Teddy Maynard was in a wheelchair and in constant pain, and even senators got themselves driven out to Langley anytime he needed them. He’d called Lake a half-dozen times in fourteen years, but Maynard was a busy man. His light-lifting was usually handled by associates.
Security barriers collapsed all around the congressman as he and his escorts worked their way into the depths of the CIA headquarters. By the time Lake arrived at Mr. Maynard’s suite, he was walking a bit taller, with just a trace of a swagger. He couldn’t help it. Power was intoxicating.
Teddy Maynard had sent for him. Inside the room, a large, square, windowless place known unofficially as the bunker, the Director was sitting alone, looking blankly at a large screen upon which the face of Congressman Aaron Lake was frozen. It was a recent photo, one taken at a black-tie fund-raiser three months earlier where Lake had half a glass of wine, ate baked chicken, no dessert, drove himself home, alone, and went to bed before eleven. The photo was appealing because Lake was so attractive—light red hair with almost no gray, hair that was not colored or tinted, a full hairline, dark blue eyes, square chin, really nice teeth. He was fifty-three years old and aging superbly. He did thirty minutes a day on a rowing machine and his cholesterol was 160. They hadn’t found a single bad habit. He enjoyed the company of women, especially when it was important to be seen with one. His steady squeeze was a sixty-year-old widow in Bethesda whose late husband had made a fortune as a lobbyist.
Both his parents were dead. His only child was a schoolteacher in Santa Fe. His wife of twenty-nine years had died in 1996 of ovarian cancer. A year later, his thirteen-year-old spaniel died too, and Congressman Aaron Lake of Arizona truly lived alone. He was Catholic, not that that mattered anymore, and he attended Mass at least once a week. Teddy pushed the button and the face disappeared.
Lake was unknown outside the Beltway, primarily because he’d kept his ego in check. If he had aspirations to higher office, they were closely guarded. His name had been mentioned once as a potential candidate for governor of Arizona, but he enjoyed Washington too much. He loved Georgetown—the crowds, the anonymity, the city life—good restaurants and cramped bookstores and espresso bars. He liked theatre and music, and he and his late wife had never missed an event at the Kennedy Center.
On the Hill, Lake was known as a bright and hardworking congressman who was articulate, fiercely honest, and loyal, conscientious to a fault. Because his district was the home of four large defense contractors, he had become an expert on military hardware and readiness. He was Chairman of the House Committee on Armed Services, and it was in that capacity that he had come to know Teddy Maynard.
Teddy pushed the button again, and there was Lake’s face. For a fifty-year veteran of intelligence wars, Teddy seldom had a knot in his stomach. He’d dodged bullets, hidden under bridges, frozen in mountains, poisoned two Czech spies, shot a traitor in Bonn, learned seven languages, fought the cold war, tried to prevent the next one, had more adventures than any ten agents combined, yet looking at the innocent face of Congressman Aaron Lake he felt a knot.
He—the CIA—was about to do something the agency had never done before.
They’d started with a hundred senators, fifty governors, four hundred and thirty-five congressmen, all the likely suspects, and now there was only one. Representative Aaron Lake of Arizona.
Teddy flicked a button and the wall went blank. His legs were covered with a quilt. He wore the same thing every day—a V-necked navy sweater, white shirt, subdued bow tie. He rolled his wheelchair to a spot near the door, and prepared to meet his candidate.”

RATING:.
5

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
5/10/2024- 5/31/2024 ( )

Harry Rex Vonner , Book 2

Surprisingly (for a Grisham novel), this was poorly plotted with too many implausible scenarios to carry the theme forward (a closet gay as a presidential candidate, jailed judges running a scam). The detailed path of an unknown candidate for President (USA), could have been a lot more succinct. Surely all those 'romp to success' campaign stops didn't need such detail. Then there was a layer of idiocy in having a top-of-the-line jet airplane catch fire ~ so ridiculously contrived to create a reveal. And why make out that the main character (Aaron Lake) was suddenly so inept?

On the plus side, some of the characterizations were excellent. Grisham brought the lawyer, Trevor Carson, to life in showing what an an unlikable idiot he was, thoroughly inept and motivated by greed. The prison situation was rather amusing, though the judges were somewhat cardboard characters. Less said about the flat-lined dénouement, the better. ( )

This was a surprisingly dull book with a predictable plot that unfolded over many pages. Thankfully, the CIA shenanigans kept me entertained and Teddy Maynard quickly became my favourite character. I'm also uncomfortable by the patently immoral ending: this is the second of Grisham's that I've read where ethics are sacrificed for the story. In this case, I was not entertained.
I will say, though, it's amazing that the book was published before 9/11. Grisham certainly has the pulse on current events and all but predicted the terrible attacks. In this sense, it is a fascinating read of politics and backroom manipulations. ( )