In The Guardians, readers were teased with a voodoo-cursed cabin that..ended up never being visiting again, causing me to wonder why on Earth it had been included to begin with. Camino Ghosts revisits not that cabin, but the general premise of voodoo curses. The hurricane that savaged the area in Camino Winds has so changed some of the barrier islands near Camino that one of them, “Dark Island” is now an attractive option for development. Centuries ago, it was home to a population of escaped slaves, whose numbers were especially bolstered after a slave-ship was destroyed by a severe storm and its survivors washed up there. Fiercely independent, they resisted any attempts at the American government at bringing them under DC’s control, and rumors are that the island is cursed to kill any white man who steps foot on it. The island was abandoned by the mid-20th century, but its last resident to leave is still alive and alleges ownership of the island. As development companies appear to go to war in court to claim title to it, Mercer decides to write the survivor’s story. (Mercer is the generally forgettable main character of the Camino books.) The result is an unusual thriller story for Grisham, one with an initially eerie air that gradually evaporates in favor of legal drama and padding (ye gods, the padding) before returning in an flimsier way. It’s one of Grisham’s vanishingly rare stories with a genuinely happy ending: usually we’re left with endings like The Rainmaker or The Brethren, when the baddie is stopped but escapes justice, or worse endings like that of Sooley, which Grisham’s house should have been egged over.

My chief gripe with this book was also the thing that made it most interesting: the premise of a extralegal community whose sovereignty was maintained by a voodoo curse. I’ve been reading Grisham long enough to know he’s a lazy writer, frankly, and I was not surprised at the lack of worldbuilding on the island, resulting in the survivor-heir complaining that the federal government had never tried to build schools or water or yadayadayada on the island while at the same time being all proud and spooky over the curse that would make any whites drop dead, regardless of their intent. (The ‘curse’ even claims some pilots who flew too low over the island taking photographs.) The original islanders literally made a habit of killing anyone who came to it, and those who visited even after the islanders had all died or left also died because of the black magic, so why on earth is she angry that…no one wanted to come to the island? Grisham never touches on what kind of interactions the islanders had in the 20th century with mainland Florida, government or commercial, so it’s like their isolation exists only to the degree that it’s relevant for the survivor’s ire, or for the general spookiness. And speaking of, Grisham never touches on whether the curse is real or not, though he writes it as though it were: the survivor, in order to expedite an attempt to find her people’s cemetery and prove her claim of residence, “Lovely” uses the voodoo she learned from her forbears to dispel the curse. Personally I would’ve brought in an exorcist rather than Miss Cleo, if you’ve got ‘spirits’ killing people for trespassing.

In short, this was a book with a fun premise, one that someone like Stephen King could absolutely hit a homer on, but one which is frankly wasted on Grisham given his dislike of research, his absent worldbuilding, and the amount of padding present in the book. If it were reduced to actual story, we’d have 150 pages or so: fruitless sidetracks like Mercer and her Dumb Husband’s Inability to Paint a House, as well as The Never-eending Commentary on Lovely’s Robes and Turbans give it more extra baggage than a serial divorcee.