The Brethren By John Grisham Essay, Research Paper

The book I read was The Brethren, by John Grisham. It was a suspense book. Three judges, called The Brethren by their fellow prisoners, lived in a very minimal security prison. They had just begun fine ? tuning a mail scam that extorted homosexuals with families and lots of money. Then, they snag the wrong person, someone very powerful on the outside. It seems The Brethren?s days of scamming are over.

This was a great book for many reasons. The first reason is it was sort of double sided. What I mean by that is it explained 2 stories at once, the story of Aaron Lake and the story of The Brethren. I liked this because it helped to understand the situation a lot better. It also helped understand the characters a lot more too. Another thing I liked about this book is the fact that the scam was brilliant. The Brethren had nothing to loose because they were already in prison, and they had so much to gain. These (the victims of the scam) were people who couldn?t talk against The Brethren for fear of being caught by their families. One example of the fact that the victims couldn?t report this to the police was when The Brethren snagged Quince Garbe, who lived in a small town and who?s father owned a bank. If Quince spoke out against The Brethren, he would loose his father?s inheritance to the bank, and the whole town would disrespect him. After he gave the Brethren their asking price of $100,000, they immediately asked for another $20,000. He had no choice but to pay them. Another reason I liked this book was it showed how corrupt our government could be. Aaron Lake pretty much bought the election, getting almost 60 million dollars from defense contractors in return to double the military budget. Of course, he did have quite a bit of help from the C.I.A. who staged events in the Middle East to increase enthusiasm for the doubled military budget.

On a scale of one to five (five being the highest rating) I would give this book a 4. It was a pretty good plot and you didn?t know what was going to happen next. You didn?t know if The Brethren would nail Aaron Lake or if the C.I.A. would knock off The Brethren before they could nail him. I would first recommend this book to anyone that likes reading because you have to like reading in order to enjoy a longer book like this is. But if you are an experienced reader, and you know what you like, then this book is for people who enjoy mystery, drama, and great ending.