SRP Book Review #28

The King of Torts by John Grisham

376 pages

So, most of the other John Grisham books I've read have a plucky, ethical hero(/ine), usually a young attorney, who uses his or her legal expertise to bring down some sort of bad guy. Here, Clay Carter, a young attorney, has a couple of lucrative class action lawsuits sort of handed to him. Clay is introduced to us as someone with a code of ethics, he's a public defender and is particularly interested in saving historic Virginia battlefields from his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend's developer father. With his newly made millions, Clay buys a jet and a home in the Caribbean, takes up with a model he doesn't particularly like (and crashes the aforementioned ex-girlfriend's wedding), and takes on several other class action suits of dubious legal merit. He seems to feel bad about settling his trusting clients' bad drug lawsuits for a low number, and refusing a reasonable settlement with a small-ish company, causing them to go bankrupt. But not bad enough to do anything especially heroic about it.

I guess I just didn't really get the point of this book. It could have been an interesting take on the other side of a typical Grisham story, but Clay was too bland and wishy washy to make a particularly good villain. He continues to pine for his ex-girlfriend, but there really was no indication to me that they even loved each other all that much. I did learn some things about tort litigation, but I could have learned the same stuff in a much more entertaining book if Grisham had cast it with more interesting and/or sympathetic characters.