[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on The Testament by John Grisham - Book Report
True to form, the latest John Grisham novel opens with a killer hook. Dressed in a green turban and white silk robes, the 10th-richest man in America scribbles his signature on a short, blunt handwritten will, then promptly leaps from a terrace 14 floors up. Gotcha! But if you think Troy Phelan's gaudy exit and the disposition of his $11 billion estate will ignite yet another of Grisham's skillfully tangled legal thrillers, forget about it. Before you can even say "probate," The Testament does a startling 180, turning into a slick but crotchety amalgam of The African Queen and a Sunday-school parable.
Phelan, we soon discover, has stiffed his six greedy children--"a miserable bunch, all of them"--and left his fortune to a 42-year-old illegitimate daughter nobody knew existed. (Grisham 321) Stunned, the family and its brace of lawyers mount an immediate assault on the will. The designated heiress, meanwhile, remains oblivious to the hoopla. And if that seems a bit of a stretch--well, Rachel Lane happens to be a Christian missionary working with a tribe of Indians "somewhere" on the remote Brazil-Bolivia border. When Phelan's attorney Josh Stafford decides to send an associate to find her and bring her home, the man he selects for the job is a middle-aged substance abuser with suicidal tendencies. Only in fiction, folks.
One day Nate O'Riley is drying out in a $1,000-a-day rehab unit; the next he's venturing deep--then deeper still, via prop plane and progressively smaller boats--into the Pantanal, the world's largest wetlands. Piranhas? Of course. Alligators? Definitely. Anacondas? Oh, yeah. And mosquitoes galore. But for a guy who's flat broke, under indictment for income-tax evasion, facing disbarment and a term in federal prison, bugs, predators, storms, and heat seem almost a welcome relief.....
