The Brethren

The Brethren

(Written By: John Grisham)

The book I read was The Brethren, by John Grisham. It was a suspense book. Three ex-judges, called The Brethren by their fellow prisoners (in for various crimes against the courts and such), lived in a very minimal security prison. They had just begun fine - tuning a mail scam. This scam was ran by a lawyer on the outside who would come in everyday, give them there mail and deliver any mail that was needed. This scam extorted homosexuals with families and lots of money. They would write letters to each other until they had enough prove that the person was a true homosexual and then they would threaten to tell the world if the victim did not pay they amount specified. The Lawyer on the outside was greatly profiting from this for the fact that he collected 30 percent of each transaction. 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 defence contractors in return to double