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Title: The King of Torts by John Grisham ISBN: 0-440-24153-7 Publisher: Dell Publishing Company Pub. Date: 16 December, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.94 (480 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Lightweight morality tale
Comment: This book is a pleasant read, better than Grisham's recent offerings but lacking the depth and substance of his earlier works. The theme "greed is bad" is simplistic and the plot moves straight ahead with no subplots to add interest. Clay Carter as a main character failed to win my empathy simply because he was so weak. Greed sucked him up as easily as a lint ball under a vacuum cleaner with no protest or moral battle on his part. And his girlfriends were almost cartoonish, especially Ridley, who seemed nothing more than an adolescent male fantasy of pumped [breasts], perfect body, and a constant desire to get naked. Rebecca was almost as bad in her own way, with little redeeming qualities to recommend her. Further, her motive for the eventual and sudden springing loose from the tight parental paws was never explained. Another detraction was the ludicrous names Grisham chose for the supporting characters. Patton French? Zach Battle? Tequila Watson? He must have pulled them out of the phone book after a bad night's sleep. I also found the repetition of pet phrases tiresome. By the middle of the book, I felt if I read "I'm listening" or "serious money" one more time, I was going to rip out the pages. Nevertheless the book had enough interest to keep me reading and offered a glimpse into a life most of us will never experience. Grisham's style is always easy to read and at least he doesn't find it necessary, as so many authors do, to descend into sordid sex and foul language as an excuse for poor plotting. However, Grisham can do better. Maybe he's not up to it anymore. The pressure to be brilliant repeatedly must be overwhelming. Since he's still a favorite author despite his flaws, I'll give him four stars. Anybody else would get three.
Rating: 2
Summary: Grisham is as greedy as his protagonist
Comment: I think I am through with John Grisham. His earlier books were exciting and featured some actual character development. His later books are completely formulaic, predictable and shallow. Perhaps this is because he is turning out books at a rapid-fire pace.
To accept this book, you have to get past the initial actions of the protagonist, Clay Carter. Carter is a burnt-out public defender assigned to represent Tequila Watson, a 20-year-old recovering addict without a history of violence, in a murder trial. The murder is perplexing; Watson shied away from any confrontation and seemed to have no motive. Enter Max Pace: a "fire fighter" for a major pharmaceutical company, who explains that Watson has been taking Tarvan, a prescription drug rushed into the marketplace prior to the completion of a thorough study of its side effects. In a small percentage of its users, it causes sudden, unprovoked violent outbursts. Pace offers Clay millions of dollars to drop Tequila as a client, start his own firm, and represent the victims of the Tarvan killers in a quick and low-profile settlement.
And so Clay does! He drops his client, keeps the scandal of Tarvan silent, and leaves Tequila to be sentenced to a life term in prison without ever mentioning Tarvan! From there, he enters the mass tort game, suing huge companies in class-action suits, angling for the biggest settlement possible--not for the good of the class-action clients, but for the greedy lawyers' benefit.
How are we supposed to like this character whatsoever? He wrestles with the moral obligations to Tequila for about half a second before dumping him, and we are supposed to think that he has any scruples? His character, and the characters of his girlfriends and associates, are completely undeveloped and superficial.
I give this book 2 stars because Grisham's take on the world of mass-tort law was interesting. I have no idea if it is accurate. I am a lawyer, and I bristle somewhat with the notion of portraying personal injury lawyers as greedy. Generally, the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies are greedy--not the attorney suing these companies who is actually working in his clients' best interests.
I think Grisham writing a book about greed like this is particularly interesting. I wondered the whole time what he was getting paid to write this shallow book, if he has a private jet and a Porsche. He definitely worked harder when he wrote books like A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, and The Pelican Brief, and the results were a hundred times better.
Rating: 2
Summary: Not one of his better efforts
Comment: Every time I finish a Grisham novel, I swear that I will never read another one. But later, in a moment of weakness while browsing an airport gift shop for a light read for the flight or flipping through a copy of his latest paperback that has been strategically placed with the other impulse items in the checkout line at the grocery store, I will pick up another.
Like all of Grisham's novels, this was an enjoyable enough read, although painfully familiar and predictable to anybody who has read 3 or 4 of his other legal thrillers. However, I found this one to be one of his weaker novels. I found the main character, one Clay Carter, to be very unbelievable. Whether he was running his very lucrative, $100 million dollar law firm almost solely on the vague tips of a mysterious stranger that he knows very little about or was short selling 100,000 shares of a pharmaceutical company on the eve of his firm's filing a class action lawsuit against that company - after instructing his accountant to be very conservative with the books ("No sense trying to beat the government out of a some taxes. Pay them and sleep well") only four pages earlier, I had a hard time taking this character seriously. (What was more infuriating than the inconsistency regarding the insider trading incident was the fact that it didn't occur to Mr. Carter that there was anything illegal about the trade until about 200 pages later in the novel, and even then, he concluded that it was probably 'a gray area' - I guess Mr. Carter slept through those securities law courses at Georgetown Law School.)
But more than that, when I finished this book, I was left feeling less than satisfied. Mr. Grisham is usually very good about tying off all of the loose ends and packaging his endings with a nice moralistic bow. Unfortunately, he doesn't do so with this book.
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Title: Bleachers by John Grisham ISBN: 0385511612 Publisher: Doubleday Books Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Last Juror (GRISHAM, JOHN) by John Grisham ISBN: 0385510438 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 03 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: The Summons by John Grisham ISBN: 0440241073 Publisher: Dell Publishing Company Pub. Date: 17 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown ISBN: 0385504209 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 18 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Angels & Demons by Dan Brown ISBN: 0671027360 Publisher: Pocket Star Books Pub. Date: 26 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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