47 pages • 1 hour read
John GrishamCamino Island
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Recruit”
In two weeks, when the semester is over, Mercer Mann’s adjunct classes will finish, and she will be unemployed. She is depressed about being 31 years old and jobless, which explains why, when Donna Watson contacted her about teaching at a private academy, Mercer reluctantly agrees to meet for lunch. She doesn’t want to teach high school but can’t turn down a steady paycheck, especially since her second novel is three years past its deadline.
When she arrives at the restaurant, however, Donna Watson quickly informs Mercer that her real name is Elaine Shipley. She works for a security company investigating the theft of five Fitzgerald manuscripts from Princeton, on behalf of Princeton’s insurance company. She believes that the manuscripts are being held by Bruce Cable, a book dealer and owner of Bay Books, on Camino Island. Elaine explains that they’ve tried unsuccessfully to get close to him, hoping to access his vault, where he keeps his most valuable books.
Mercer reflects on how her grandmother, Tessa, owned a cottage on Camino Island, and she had spent every summer there as a child. After Tessa’s death 11 years ago, Mercer hasn’t returned, but the family still owns the cottage. Elaine proposes that Mercer go on sabbatical, not uncommon for writers, and move into her grandmother’s cottage for six months. Her job will be to get close to Bruce, and attempt to gain access to his vault and the manuscripts. As a side benefit, while she is investigating Bruce, she can work on her novel.
Mercer is dubious until Elaine offers to pay her $100,000. When she gets home that night, she thinks about the offer, remembering Bruce Cable in his seersucker suits and long hair from her childhood. When her first novel had come out, she had scheduled a reading at Bay Books, but cancelled her tour after humiliating turnouts at the first three stops.
Mercer’s mail that day contains her official dismissal letter from the university, a credit card statement, and her student loan bill. When Elaine calls to ask her to reconsider, Mercer agrees to meet her for dinner. Elaine tells her that the FBI hasn’t closed the case, and Elaine’s company is pursuing its own line of investigation. She claims that everything they are doing is legal, and at a certain point, they will turn everything their investigation reveals over to the FBI.
Mercer wonders what would be required to get close to Bruce. Elaine leaves it up to her, but tells her that Bruce and his wife Noelle have an open marriage. Noelle has a long-time lover in France, while Bruce often sleeps with visiting authors.
When Elaine asks Mercer why she hasn’t returned since Tessa’s death, Mercer tries to explain the important role that her grandmother played in her life. Her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia when Mercer was six years old, and entered a psychiatric hospital, where she has lived ever since. Her father was successful when she was younger, but was distant and uninvolved. She and her sister are not close and so she looked forward to her summers with Tess every year.
Mercer is afraid that she lacks the ability to lie convincingly enough, but Elaine reminds her that she and others will be nearby and available. She is finally convinced when Elaine agrees to pay off her student loans. Two weeks later, Mercer leaves Chapel Hill for Camino Island, first stopping to visit her mother. She also meets her father for lunch in Memphis and is immediately reminded why they don’t stay in touch—he talks about himself the entire time. Last, she drives to Tessa’s grave and places flowers.
When she arrives, Tessa’s cottage feels more anonymous than familiar and also slightly neglected. She falls asleep on the deck and is awakened by Larry, Tessa’s long-time gardener and friend. They talk about the accident that took Tessa’s life—she and a friend had been caught in a storm on his sailboat, and her body washed ashore days later.
That evening, Mercer meets up with Elaine, who gives her more specifics. She is to befriend Myra Beckwith, a local writer, and connect with the local literary community. Once she gets to know Bruce, her first task will be to access his First Editions room, and then his vault, if one exists. Elaine will supply her with some old books, supposedly Tessa’s, that Mercer can ask Bruce about, as a way in.
Joel Ribikoff owns a gallery in Georgetown, a front for his true business of dealing in stolen goods. He bought the Fitzgerald manuscripts from Denny for a half million dollars and then sold them to someone else. Now, Denny and his friend, Rooker, have returned to Joel’s gallery, prepared to torture him to find out the location of the manuscripts.
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Beachcomber”
When Mercer was young, Tessa woke her before dawn to see the sun rise over the dunes. Now, Mercer wakes up late and tries to find a good place to write in the cottage. She wants to write while she is there, but is determined to do so only if she has a good idea. In accordance with Elaine’s plan, she sends an email to Myra Beckwith, introducing herself as a fellow writer and asking her to meet for a drink. Soon after, Myra calls her and asks her over that evening.
Later, Mercer goes into town. She finds a parking spot and a café near the bookstore, eats lunch, and then window-shops, thinking of Tessa the entire time. Mercer eventually sits in a coffeeshop across from Bay Books and goes inside after she sees Bruce Cable leave. She wonders if he will recognize her from the photo on her novel, but when he returns, he doesn’t appear to remember her.
Later, Mercer goes to Myra’s house for drinks and meets her partner, Leigh. They moved to Camino Island after Tessa died, and so never knew her. Mercer explains that she is staying at the family cottage and working on her latest novel. Myra tells Mercer that she and Leigh met 30 years ago. They struggled financially until they got the idea to co-write a romance novel and have supported themselves that way ever since.
They tell her about the local writing community, and Bruce Cable’s name comes up. Myra tells her that he is the center of the writing community and goes to great lengths to support writers. She offers to meet Mercer at the bookstore for lunch and introduce her to Bruce. She then reinforces what Elaine’s note about Bruce and Noelle’s open marriage. Myra and Leigh decide to hold a dinner party and invite the writers they’ve been talking about, as well as Bruce and Noelle, to welcome Mercer.
Later, on the beach, Mercer finds loggerhead turtle tracks, and follows them to where the mother is laying her eggs in the dunes. The turtle covers the nest and returns to the sea, and Mercer waits for members of Turtle Watch, which Tessa was president of for many years, to find it. She knows they will protect the nest with signage and fencing. Mercer falls asleep in the dunes, waking as the sun rises.
At Myra and Leigh’s dinner party, Mercer meets the local authors, as well as Bruce and Noelle. Myra tells everyone about Tessa and Mercer’s childhood on the island. Bruce tells Mercer that he knew Tessa and about the accident; later, however, he apologizes for bringing it up.
Afterward, Mercer doesn’t know what to think of Bruce. She wonders if any of the other writers, or Noelle, know about his illegal book trade. She also wonders whether he knows that the FBI and Elaine’s company are looking into him. She doesn’t believe, however, that he knows she is working for them.
The day after the dinner party, Mercer begins a new novel. She works through outlining and drafting the first five chapters, and is exhausted by it. She takes a break and goes to the bookstore for lunch. When Bruce sees her, he asks her to sign the store’s copies of her book. He takes her to the First Editions Room, which he uses as an office.
After she signs her books, she asks about the first editions on the shelves. Bruce explains that every time a writer comes for a reading, he keeps a signed first edition and has amassed a large collection over the years. She questions him about the more valuable books and finds out that he keeps the rarest in the basement. They talk about another dinner party, hosted by himself and Noelle, and he invites her to look into Noelle’s store.
Three days later, Mercer meets Elaine at the Ritz bar, down the beach from the cottage. Mercer is familiar with the place, as Tessa loved it, and they had gone there a few times every summer for dinner and drinks. She tells Elaine about the dinner party, her time in the bookstore with Bruce, and the basement.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Chapter 3 is the longest chapter so far, which confirms Mercer’s significance as the novel’s protagonist. After she is introduced, the story begins in earnest, and Grisham reveals, through Elaine, how Bruce, the character introduced in Chapter 2, intersects with Denny and the heist in Chapter 1.
Yet even as Chapter 3 moves the main plot forward, it also develops Mercer’s character. The chapter begins with her status quo—the state of her life at the moment at when Elaine and the criminal intrigue enter it. Grisham develops the theme of The Writing Life as her struggles to write, her looming unemployment, and even the humiliation of book tours, are touched on. Any romantic myths or ideas about life as a writer are diminished under the details of Mercer’s circumstances. Through Mercer, Grisham critiques any glorification of the “starving artist.” Art actually suffers from financial instability rather than thrives from it: “[E]ach blank page held not the promise of another chapter in a great novel, but rather another lame effort to produce something that might satisfy her creditors” (84). This understanding of the pressures Mercer faces makes her acceptance of Elaine’s offer an almost foregone conclusion.
These chapters also share the reason behind Mercer’s reluctance to return to the island. Her grandmother Tessa’s death affected her deeply, and until now, she has responded by running away from her grief. However, this opportunity to return to the island not only answers her money problems and writing issues, but it also forces her to deal with Tessa’s death, introducing the theme of Moving Through Grief.
All of the factors in Mercer’s life converge in her acceptance of Elaine’s offer. She leaves Chapel Hill quickly, but does make several stops on her way to Camino Island. These stops give the reader direct insight into Mercer’s relationships with her parents when she visits each of them, and these interactions reinforce how important a figure Tessa was in her life. Her mother has been in a psychiatric hospital since Mercer was six, and her lunch with her father illustrates his complete self-absorption by “never once inquiring about her latest book or project. If he had read anything she had published, he never said so” (103). Her visit to Tessa’s grave is her final stop and underscores her grandmother’s importance in her life, reminding the reader of how deeply she is missed. Mercer’s visit to Tessa’s grave marks the beginning of her process of Moving Through Grief, which will continue throughout her visit to Camino Island. With Mercer’s return to the island, Grisham also has the opportunity to introduce the reader to the novel’s setting through the eyes of a character who is familiar with it, but hasn’t been back in a long time, and so is seeing it with fresh, adult eyes.
Before the end of Chapter 3, Grisham takes a moment to return to Denny’s storyline. With the introduction of Joel Ribikoff and his interaction with Denny, the reader is given to understand that Denny has returned from Panama and is on the trail of the manuscripts. Grisham offers another example of Denny’s ruthlessness when, with Joel “bound and gagged, [Denny and Rooker] began the ugly business of extracting information” (118). This scene also keeps Denny, and his movement toward Bruce, and now Mercer, at the forefront of the story.
The title of Chapter 4, “The Beachcomber,” is a reference both to Tessa and to Mercer during her childhood with Tessa. In this chapter, as she settles into the cottage, Mercer is beginning the process of Moving Through Grief, confronting her memories of her grandmother in the cottage, but also on the beach, which is where her grandmother truly lived. The scene with the loggerhead turtle shows how Mercer’s memories of Tessa and her childhood are rooted in the beach. Tessa cared for and protected turtles, just as she did Mercer. When she falls asleep in the dunes, she replicates her childhood experience; but when she wakes on the beach at daybreak, she symbolically comes to a new beginning of a phase of accepting her loss.
In Chapter 4, Mercer arrives on Camino Island and does begin a new novel, but consistent with the theme of The Writing Life, her experience in outlining and drafting the first five chapters is not exhilarating, but exhausting. Even as she is struggling both with her writing and grief, Mercer stays focused on the job she is there to do. Despite her claims to Elaine when she says, “I’m a terrible liar and I’m just not good at deceiving people” (96), Mercer proves to be adept at going undercover. She quickly gets down to business, getting in touch with Myra and Leigh immediately. In connecting with Bruce at the bookstore, she instinctively restrains her curiosity, pretending only casual interest in Bruce and his collection.
By the end of Chapter 4, Mercer’s investigation is well underway. In addition, she works through the problems with her writing and has an experience on the beach that reconnects her to Tess and Camino Island through the turtles. The book is at the halfway point, and the action rises as Bruce and Mercer intersect, and her investigation begins to make progress.
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