Instruct: Classify an Amazon review as either positive or negative.
Query: the author shows contempt for fiction

I just happened to pick this book up and read it without the preceding works in this series as a foundation. It might be that after reading all of his earlier books Lescroart's 'Second Chair' might be comfortable territory for the initiated. But as a stand alone book, this is pretty tired fare. The plot is far fetched and does not gel into the remotest idea of cohesion. The story bumps along from one character to the next like a bad auto accident. The characters are cardboard cut outs that are painful to imagine. And lastly the ending is a disaster of major "saw that coming" proportions.The writing style itself is not too shabby, though Lescroart could have whittled down the story by a hundred pages and lost nothing.Plainly, this is just a sub par Grisham.