John Grisham is back with another novel in the Theodore Boone series, The Abduction.
The book is Grisham’s second attempt to write something for an audience in an age group different from his usual courtroom-centred drama with a smattering of some thrills.
I say attempt as it is truly difficult to say how a teenager might enjoy the book, or otherwise. Grisham’s Theo Boone is no Nancy Drew, and far from the Three Investigators or the Hardy Boys.
In this book, 13-year-old Theo’s best friend, April Finnemore, goes missing in the dead of the night. Theo goes down with his parents, both lawyers (that doesn’t surprise me at all), to tell the cops and the girl’s mother whatever he knows as he’d spoken to April a few hours before.
With the police launching a manhunt but getting nowhere, it is down to Theo to bring his friend back, or so he believes. But there’s one problem with our hero: he’d be quite adept at getting April’s kidnapper punished by law if he were allowed to argue in a courtroom, but he’s no detective, and certainly not someone suited for high-adrenaline action.
There’s hardly any mystery for our teen hero to get to the bottom of, and the adventure factor is virtually non-existent. And so far as Theo goes, he’s boring, non-athletic and smart-alecky bordering on geeky. It’s not all his fault though. He’s just 13, so not allowed to do anything even remotely dangerous, and the good boy never lies to his parents.
Grisham’s Theo needs to grow more, not just in age but also as a character, before he can become an interesting hero, but from what the author does attribute him holds with little promise.
While Grisham’s books, though woven around the court of law, are imbued with enough emotion and gut-wrenching to make the reader connect with them, here he seems to have tried to make it very simple and straight, devoid of any involvement on the part of anyone who reads it.
The book is a quick read no doubt, but Grisham seems to have squeezed everything out of a story, including its intelligence, that he would’ve written for his non-adolescent readers and presented it as something aimed for a teenage audience, which is a gross underestimation on his part. The end product is dry.