Camino Island

Camino Island Review

Camino Island is the novel John Grisham writes after he decides to have some fun. Published in 2017, it is his most relaxed book — a warm, unhurried caper that swaps Mississippi courtrooms for a barrier island off the Florida coast and replaces crusading lawyers with a struggling young novelist.

The premise has the clean lines of a heist plot: a crew of thieves steals five original F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts from Princeton’s Firestone Library and sells them into the shadowy rare-books underground. The trail leads to Bruce Cable, charming owner of Bay Books on Camino Island, a man whose taste in rare manuscripts seems to exceed what a small bookshop could legitimately fund. An insurance company hires Mercer Mann — a novelist whose debut has been followed by years of writer’s block and mounting debt — to move to the island, befriend Cable, and find out what he knows.

What makes the novel unusual in Grisham’s catalogue is its atmosphere. The beach community of Santa Rosa is rendered with real affection, and the novel spends as much time on readings, dinner parties, and conversations about writing as it does on the theft. Cable himself is one of Grisham’s most appealing secondary characters — learned, generous, morally complicated, and surrounded by a circle of writers who give the book a warmly literary texture that legal thrillers rarely achieve.

Mercer’s divided loyalties — she genuinely likes Cable, and her own integrity is compromised by the operation she is running — give the novel something more than plot mechanics to hold onto. Grisham doesn’t fully exploit this tension, but it is present enough to elevate the book above pure entertainment.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Camino Island is Grisham at his most relaxed and most bookish — a change of pace that works on its own sunlit terms, even if it will frustrate readers who want maximum suspense.

Reading Guides

• John Grisham Books in Order: The Complete Reading Guide (2026)

The World of Rare Books and Manuscripts

The heist that opens Camino Island is executed with the precision of a caper film: a team of thieves breaks into Princeton’s Firestone Library and removes five original F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts — among them the handwritten drafts of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night — from one of the most secure rare-book vaults in the country. Grisham renders the theft with genuine detail about the rare-books trade: the authentication process, the underground market for stolen manuscripts, the collectors wealthy enough to pay millions for items they can never display publicly.

The Fitzgerald manuscripts are not a random choice. Fitzgerald’s work occupies a particular place in American literary mythology — the original documents of books taught in every high school English class, manuscripts whose cultural significance vastly exceeds their physical reality as paper and ink. Grisham understands that the value of such objects is partly rational and partly a shared cultural fiction maintained by the people who care about them, and he lets that ambiguity infect the novel’s moral atmosphere.

Bruce Cable and the Culture of Books

Bruce Cable is one of Grisham’s most carefully constructed supporting characters. He has built Bay Books into the cultural centre of Camino Island — hosting author events, cultivating relationships with writers who come to the island to work, maintaining the kind of bookshop that readers who love books idealise and that economic reality makes increasingly rare. His charm is genuine. His learning is genuine. His moral compromises are also genuine, and Grisham refuses to explain them away.

The writers who surround Cable on the island give Camino Island a texture that Grisham’s legal thrillers rarely achieve. Conversations about writing, failure, commercial compromise, and the strange economics of literary ambition run through the novel with evident affection. Grisham, who has sold more than 300 million copies worldwide and has occasionally been dismissed by literary critics as genre entertainment, brings an insider’s knowingness to these passages that gives them a quiet edge.

Mercer Mann and the Ethics of the Assignment

Mercer is the novel’s most interesting element. Her debut novel won praise but not sales; the follow-up has stalled for years; her finances are in crisis. The insurance company that recruits her is paying her to do something she finds genuinely uncomfortable — to befriend a man she comes to like, to extract information under the pretense of friendship, and to betray that friendship for a fee. She does it anyway, and Grisham tracks the psychological cost of that choice with more honesty than the novel’s breezy surface might suggest.

Her divided loyalties — toward Cable, toward the assignment, toward her own integrity as a writer — give the novel a moral undertow that prevents it from being pure entertainment. It never becomes the serious examination of complicity it might have been in other hands, but it is more than it appears on the surface.

A Change of Pace That Works

Published in 2017, Camino Island marked a deliberate departure for Grisham — and it was rewarded with immediate commercial success and a sequel (Camino Winds, 2020). The departure works because Grisham knows exactly what kind of book he is writing: not a legal thriller with the serial pleasures of procedure and courtroom tension, but a literary caper with the pleasures of place, character, and the culture around books. For readers who love both thrillers and the world of serious reading, it is a particular delight.