Both the missus and I just finished the latest John Grisham Book The Appeal. I have classically been a huge Grisham fan – I discovered him shortly after The Firm was published and avidly read all of the books as they came out, usually getting the hardback on day one… I enjoyed A Time to Kill, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Chamber, The Rainmaker and on and on. When he sidetracked from legal-fiction to non-legal fiction I tried them but they didn’t grab me. When I saw The Appeal was a return to legal-fiction I had high hopes we was returning to his earlier style. The Appeal started great, had a fantastic premise and the story telling was going great. The characters were relatively well developed and all interesting. Then it just fell flat, heck it just ended. Bam. This book has the most let-down ending I have experienced in years. No “moral”. No “redemption”. For a book I was so greatly enjoying for the first 95%, I had a strong suspicion when I saw how little was left in the book (given the current state of the story) that the ending was going to train wreck. Still, I saw several options he could have taken to recover the story but he chose none of them. The ending just left me feeling cheated. While I can see what he was going for, exposing current issues with corruption, big business, and election manipulation, there are many ways he could have ended the story better, in my opinion. I’ll think twice before reading another book from an author who used to be one of my favorites. Call this a “dissenting opinion”.