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Grisham as Frommer's Having read all of John Grisham's work, I rate this as middle of the road at best. Any action or perceived "thriller" became engulfed in Grisham's Reader's Digest history of Italy. One might expect a typical page-turner from the king of legal thrillers, but from about 50 pages in to about 50 pages from the end, the book completely bogs down in English-Italian translation. Joel Backman, a Washington, DC, power broker, gets a controversial presidential pardon after 6 years in the slammer for trying to hawk a satellite jamming software to the highest bidder. The CIA worked the pardon in order to see who might be interested in killing Backman, giving them a lead on who was trying to purchase the software. Much of the book takes place in Italy, where Backman was hiding and forced to learn the language and customs to blend in. While some of the Italian history was interesting, the pages upon pages of language tutoring was simply too much and too boring for a typical Grisham work. Backman could also be one of the more forgettable protagonists in Grisham's body of work. We'll see what Hollywood does with him.