The Boys from Biloxi

3 stars. It's been a while since I've read a Grisham book and I don't think this was the one to jump into because it took way too long to get started, filling pages with background on the coastal town of Biloxi, the Croatian immigrants who settled there, the history through generations until we finally come to the current showdown between two childhood friends whose paths in life diverged – one followed his lawyer father and became a district attorney, the other also followed his father who runs the criminal underworld in the community nicknamed the Dixie Mafia. The setup leads to a final courtroom drama, which Grisham handles like the maestro he is, but it was too little, too late for me. I found myself longing for an editor who would have helped the author trim the fat from this book and fashion it into the faster-paced legal thriller Grisham fans wait for. If you like epic sagas of good vs. evil, personified by two men from opposite sides of the law, this book will delight you. If you're looking for nuanced story telling with characters who grow and change during the narrative, this might not be the right fit.

My thanks to Net Galley for providing me with an Advanced Reader Copy.

Needs More Showing And Less Telling. This is almost "Novel Writing 101" these days, but a classic and oft repeated bit of advice for new writers is that they should *show* the actions of their characters rather than *tell* the readers about it. Here, Grisham - a normally masterful storyteller and legend in the business - somehow manages to miss that, to the detriment of the overall tale here. The tale itself, a multi-generational saga tracing two families through 60 or so years of Coastal Mississippi history, is actually quite good. I was 15% into the tale before I even realized it, and not much had happened at that point. The back quarter to third or so could *really* have been quite legendary in its own right with more showing and less telling, but even in this format it was still a compelling tale. The ending is a bit abrupt and perhaps too open-ended for some readers, but other than the abruptness I thought it actually worked reasonably well. But getting there, across nearly 500 pages that other readers have compared to investigative nonfiction rather than an legal fictional thriller, can in fact be a bit of a slog. Still, other than the "show don't tell" aspect, there really isn't anything here to actually say "this is particularly bad" about. Thus, only the single star reduction. Still, this really is a great tale for those who can bear with it, and for that reason it is very much recommended.