Reviews: 'Napoleon's Last Island,' by Thomas Keneally, and 'The Whistler,' by John Grisham

By Thomas Keneally. (Atria Books, 423 pages, $30.)

Australian Thomas Keneally, author of "Schindler's List" and 2013's brilliant "The Daughters of Mars," is one of the finest living English-language writers. His sprawling new novel tries to do what he has done well so many times — set real and fictional characters in a real time and place and use their story to illuminate the era. This time, he has chosen a titan — Napoleon — and set him in a miniature world, the remote Atlantic island of St. Helena, where the fallen emperor died during his final exile.

Drawing on some curious historic accounts of Napoleon's unlikely friendship with a rambunctious British teenager, Betsy Balcombe, who considers herself "the playmate from the childhood he had never had," and her family, Keneally creates an intricate, intense world driven by power plays, culture clashes, secrets and deceptions. Napoleon, whom Keneally manages to make both appealing and repulsive, plays people like chess pieces, and the Balcombes' devotion to him is ultimately their ruination.

Betsy's passage from child to woman, which occurs during a shocker of a scene (no, it's not what you think), is jaw-dropping and extremely affecting. But it's hard to wade through the labyrinth of endless, seemingly pointless mini-scenes and navigate the scores of characters to follow the story's main thread. One grows bored even as one admires Keneally's mastery of his subject and sentences. This is a book you get lost in, but not in the hoped-for way.

PAMELA MILLER

By John Grisham. (Doubleday, 374 pages, $28.95.)

There's something different about this John Grisham page-turner, but we have to turn a few pages to figure out what. Protagonist Lacy Stoltz investigates misconduct complaints about judges. Most of her work involves jurists who have lost the battle with the bottle or have simply lost interest in what they do. But then she hears from a whistleblower claiming that a judge is on the take from organized crime. When she starts snooping around, nasty things begin happening, so she calls in the FBI.

Whoa! She calls in the FBI? That's not very Grisham-like, at all. His typical protagonist is a lone wolf who takes on the establishment — from institutionalized racism in "A Time to Kill" to shady government insiders in "The Broker" to corporate greed in "Gray Mountain" — while using nothing but persistence, shrewdness and pluck to crack the case. He doesn't write about people who are a part of the mega-machine themselves and simply summon the investigative cavalry to come charging in with subpoenas, grand juries and a truckload of high-tech gadgets.

Grisham is adept at cooking up fast-moving stories, and he does his usual top-notch job of outlining the plot's convoluted legal machinations without turning the narrative into a law school lecture. But as the case progresses, Lacy becomes less and less of a participant, until she's little more than an observer. It's an interesting tale, but it's ultimately missing the virtuous tilting-at-windmills element that typically draws us into Grisham's stories.

JEFF STRICKLER