Heaven ...

Title: Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Author: Sidney Sheldon • Publisher: William Morrow
Price: (paperback) ¥1,575 • ISBN: 0-06-073732-8

There was a time when if you asked a Japanese person
if they had read a book by a Western author they would answer "Sidney Sheldon". These days people are more likely to say they have read a Harry Potter book, but Sheldon has not gone away, and has perhaps gone to a higher plane of literary existence, judging from his latest novel. Are You Afraid of the Dark? is presented in large format with an iridescent gold finish and a dreamy, faded, almost sepia image on the cover of a woman of obvious wealth and breeding gazing dreamily from a window at the Eiffel Tower. It is as if the book is something ethereal, something not printed or written but minted on a cloud somewhere by angels that has wafted down to us on a sigh from a Muse — Calliope, perhaps, or Erato.

And the characters in Are You Afraid of the Dark? occupy rarefied climes too: they live in glam cities, have glam quantities of money, have glam jobs and sometimes hold the future of mankind in their hands. They also die in interesting ways, and never of old age or boredom. They are dropped from the Eiffel Tower or their private planes are plucked from the sky. Four murders in four cities around the world leave two canny widows fighting off more assassination attempts. Is it all because one is a key witness in a gangster trial, or is it because all the dead people were connected with a person or thing known only as Prima, which is such a secret I cannot mention it here?

Not the most sophisticated fiction in the world perhaps, but you are whirled around the world from thrill to thrill and where the whirling stops nobody knows, except him up there: our Sid.

... And Earth

Title: The Last Juror
Author: John Grisham • Publisher: Dell
Price: (paperback) ¥1,092 • ISBN: 0-440-29631-5

John Grisham's name probably produces buckets of bile and spit from working writers everywhere. Not because he is bad, but because he is so casually good, and while a great many might aspire, few will do as well.

Grisham gives us page after page of unpretentious, uncluttered story and he does it with an ease that suggests he is winning an FI Grand Prix with one hand on the wheel and his feet hanging out the cockpit while polishing his nails.

The first page of The Last Juror draws you in and you don't want to put it down and you don't know quite why. There's talk of murder and lives gone wrong, and injustice and more murder, but no real action. There's just this stranger hinting at things you can't yet fathom, but who, without saying much, has evoked a whole complicated history to get lost in.

The novel (apparently his 16th) is about a young journalism graduate who accidentally comes to own a newspaper in Verysmalltown, Mississippi. Grisham: of course, the South — stifling humidity and deeply rooted people suspicious of outsiders! Business goes well, but then there is a particularly gruesome murder in the town and the zealous young hack digs deeper than people think he should. Nine years later, jurors of the murder trial start to die one by one and our hero is dragged back into the past.

Grisham's characters and perhaps premises are tinged with the improbable, but underscored with utter credibility. The trick is in the down to earthness of the detail. Grisham brings us ordinary believable folk drawn so succinctly that even if they are barking mad or events take an unlikely turn we are with him every word. Big talent he may be, but he knows the mud of regular life.

Book Reviews by Chris Page