Camino Island: A Novel,New

Product Description#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A delightfully lighthearted caper . . . [a] fastmoving, entertaining tale.Pittsburgh PostGazetteA gang of thieves stage a daring heist from a vault deep below Princeton Universitys Firestone Library. Their loot is priceless, impossible to resist.Bruce Cable owns a popular bookstore in the sleepy resort town of Santa Rosa on Camino Island in Florida. He makes his real money, though, as a prominent dealer in rare books. Very few people know that he occasionally dabbles in unsavory ventures.Mercer Mann is a young novelist with a severe case of writers block who has recently been laid off from her teaching position. She is approached by an elegant, mysterious woman working for an even more mysterious company. A generous monetary offer convinces Mercer to go undercover and infiltrate Cables circle of literary friends, to get close to the ringleader, to discover his secrets.But soon Mercer learns far too much, and theres trouble in paradiseas only John Grisham can deliver it.ReviewA delightfully lighthearted caper . . . [a] fastmoving, entertaining tale.Pittsburgh PostGazetteA happy lark [that] provides the pleasure of a leisurely jaunt periodically jolted into high gear, just for the fun and speed of it.The New York Times Book ReviewSheer catnip . . . [Grisham] reveals an amiable, sardonic edge here that makes Camino Island a most agreeable summer destination.USA TodayFans will thrill with the classic chase and satisfying ending; and book lovers will wallow in ecstasy.The Florida TimesUnionAbout the AuthorJohn Grisham is the author of fortyseven consecutive #1 bestsellers, which have been translated into nearly fifty languages. His recent books include The Judge's List, Sooley, and his third Jake Brigance novel, A Time for Mercy, which is being developed by HBO as a limited series.Grisham is a twotime winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was honored with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction.When he's not writing, Grisham serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project and of Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. Much of his fiction explores deepseated problems in our criminal justice system.John lives on a farm in central Virginia.Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.CHAPTER ONEThe Heist1.The imposter borrowed the name of Neville Manchin, an actual professor of American literature at Portland State and soontobe doctoral student at Stanford. In his letter, on perfectly forged college stationery, Professor Manchin claimed to be a budding scholar of F. Scott Fitzgerald and was keen to see the great writers manuscripts and papers during a forthcoming trip to the East Coast. The letter was addressed to Dr. Jeffrey Brown, Director of Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University. It arrived with a few others, was duly sorted and passed along, and eventually landed on the desk of Ed Folk, a career junior librarian whose task, among several other monotonous ones, was to verify the credentials of the person who wrote the letter.Ed received several of these letters each week, all in many ways the same, all from selfproclaimed Fitzgerald buffs and experts, and even from the occasional true scholar. In the previous calendar year, Ed had cleared and logged in 190 of these people through the library. They came from all over the world and arrived wideeyed and humbled, like pilgrims before a shrine. In his thirtyfour years at the same desk, Ed had processed all of them. And, they were not going away. F. Scott Fitzgerald continued to fascinate. The traffic was as heavy now as it had been three decades earlier. These days, though, Ed was wondering what could possibly be left of the great writers life that had no