This combination photo shows the book 'Camino Winds' and its author John Grisham. TNS

Gulf Today Report

As with all John Grisham novels, there are lots of men being nervous and a heroic few who remain cool and calm in a crisis.

Bruce Cable, the owner of Bay Books in downtown Santa Rosa, is one of the tranquil men in Grisham’s new thriller — the second in a new series set on Florida’s Camino Island.

Cable is an engaging protagonist, full of ambiguities, a man whose own morality is full of “grey areas.”

Camino is a place of “misfits” and Cable presides over “literary mafia” that includes thriller writers, wannabe authors and the septuagenarian authors Myra and Leigh, who make a living “cranking out soft p*** romance novels.”

His lively bookshop, which provides homemade biscuits, coffee and pastries for early morning customers, is at the hub of the island.

The island is hit by a Category 4 hurricane at the start of "Camino Winds." Someone takes advantage of “the perfect time” to commit a murder.

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In this case, it’s Cable’s friend, the crime author Nelson Kerr, who is found with head wounds after the storm.

Cable’s sleuthing morphs into a trademark Grisham conspiracy thriller, this time involving the multimillion-dollar nursing home industry.

Dark secrets about illegal drugs, the rapes of nonresponsive bed-ridden patients, and a nefarious corporation that “cares about nothing but profits” slickly unfolds.

"Camino Winds" has all the usual Grisham hallmarks — a pacy plot, tension-filled scenes — and the descriptions of a storm-battered island are well executed.

One irritation, however, is the dreary sexism that peppers the novel, from islander Bob Cobb’s jokes about chasing “young divorcees in string bikinis” and prowling for women who are “old enough, barely,” to the unlikely scenario of a professional sniper scoping a tanned, thin victim wearing “black string panties” and saying to himself “such a waste” as he takes aim.

Perhaps Grisham fans don’t mind. As Myra remarks, at one of Cable’s literary dinner parties, “Murder sells… remember that when those royalty checks arrive.”