Camino Island

About the Camino Island series

Camino Island is John Grisham's lighter, book-world detour from the courtroom: a trilogy set on a fictional Florida barrier island built around Bay Books, the independent bookstore run by charming, quietly shady dealer Bruce Cable, who trades in first editions and rare manuscripts and isn't always too careful about where they came from. The opening novel, Camino Island (2017), follows struggling novelist Mercer Mann, hired by an insurance investigator to move to the island, befriend Cable, and find out whether he's sitting on a set of stolen F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts lifted from Princeton's library in a real-feeling heist. Camino Winds (2020) turns to a Category 4 hurricane that flattens the island and leaves a visiting writer dead in his rental cottage — a death the storm makes easy to write off as an accident, until Bruce and the island's tight literary community start asking questions. Camino Ghosts (2024) shifts to a courtroom fight over Dark Isle, a nearby uninhabited island claimed by the descendants of escaped slaves who settled there generations ago, with Bruce and Mercer helping an elderly local historian defend her family's claim against a developer.

These are Grisham in a relaxed register — bookshop gossip, beach-town texture, and puzzle-box plotting stand in for his usual legal-thriller tension, though Camino Ghosts does swing back toward a real trial. It's a good pick for readers who love Grisham's storytelling but want a break from the courtroom, or anyone who enjoys novels about the book trade itself.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with Camino Island (2017). The books share Bruce Cable, his bookstore, and the island's cast of writer friends, and later books casually reference earlier events, so reading in order gives the fullest picture, though each book's central mystery is self-contained enough that you could follow Camino Winds or Camino Ghosts without having read the one before. Mercer Mann, the closest thing the series has to a lead character, appears in all three books and gets the most from being read in sequence.