Curse of the missing millions

Ray Atlee is a 43-year-old professor of law at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Recently divorced, he's thinking vaguely of making a play for a graduate student with a tight, blue-jeaned ass, is working in desultory fashion on a book about monopolies, and, a keen amateur pilot, has fallen out of love with the Cessna on which he learnt to fly and is leching after a second-hand Beech Bonanza. In other words, a normal, peaceful academic life. But its even tenor is disrupted when his father, Judge Reuben Atlee, summons him back to the family home, a dilapidated antebellum mansion in Clanton, Mississippi. Here he finds the old man's corpse and $3,118,000 in hundred dollar bills, neatly stacked in old stationery boxes.

Its presence raises a number of questions: how did the judge, a man of high moral principles and rigid integrity, acquire the money? Should Ray report it to the IRS? Should he reveal its existence to his younger brother Forrest, an alcoholic ne'er-do-well and drug addict who's been caroming in and out of detox like a demented pinball? The Summons is perhaps not one of John Grisham's best novels: there's not a great deal of plot. It's essentially the story of Ray's tribulations when in possession of a large amount of unattributable folding money - and the climax is a shade disappointing. But there are consolations on the way, such as Ray's dinner - oysters, crab-meat salad and swordfish, sluiced down with three top-of-the-range white burgundies - on Patton French's yacht, King of Torts, off Biloxi. French is, indeed, a king of torts, who specialises in suing drug firms on behalf of thousands of clients, and will be worth a billion dollars a few years hence. And almost no one tells a story better than John Grisham: there's an Ancient Mariner implacability about the way the story grips one with its skinny hand and glittering eye on the first page and doesn't let up for 340 more.