We have reviewed other books by this author before. For examples, see The Street Lawyer or The Chamber, to name just two.
The nice thing about John Grisham’s books is that the stories may have the same style and may have to do with legal matters, but the story is so different from each other that it is refreshing to read them. Not many other authors do this. For instance, Perry Mason novels are so close to each other that you cannot keep the story apart in your head after reading five of them. Wilbur Smith has very similar tales of the different generations of Courtneys and Ballantynes. Not so John Grisham.
Take this book, for instance. A very nice story of the rise and fall of a young lawyer starting full of idealist notions.
Tequila Watson, just 20 years old is arrested after killing Pumpkin in broad daylight with a gun and is hauled to the court. Court appoints Clay Carter to defend him, against Clay’s wishes.
Carter is a reluctant defence lawyer. He wanted to swim in money after law school by joining his own dad’s firm but dad went bankrupt in the last year of law school.
He meets Clay. Who seems to say that he killed the man because ‘he needed to shoot something’ that day.
He meets Talmoud X who runs the tough rehab centre where Tequila was before he committed the murder. This part reminds you of which earlier book by Grisham? (The do gooder person giving up a good life to help – probably many of them!)
Another common theme is the scheming parents of his love, Rebecca – the vain and name dropping Bennett Van Horne and his dutifully status conscious wife Barbara.
The book really comes into its own, and branches out into thankfully new territory when Carter is summoned by an anonymous lawyer and given a lot of money for settlement because there is a drug touted as cure for addiction, which took shortcut in clinical trials that is the cause of Tequila and one other person going on a killing trip.
Clay is offered unbelievable amount of money to set up on his own and go after a settlement with the mysterious medical company. He accepts. He then convinces all seven of the victims to accept the settlement. Then he is offered an even bigger deal to go for tort case against a competitor’s drug called Dyloft.
He teams up with a mammoth lawyer called Patton French. They go after Dyloft, on a ‘throw everything in the fire’ kind of gamble for Clay. Clay goes from strength to strength and is called ‘The King of Torts’ by the media frenzy. He goes petulantly with a hired top model to Rebecca’s wedding and gets thrown out politely by the bodyguard.
He now goes after a new medicine with Pace all by themselves for a bigger slice of the profit and gets nailed by the press.
Everything starts to unravel when FBI reveal that Max Pace is a criminal and they are investigating Clay too for insider trading. And Healthy Living, a mass tort client, files for bankruptcy, ruining the millions Clay had spent in that case.
He find himself pilloried, and also under FBI investigation for insider trading. The papers and his former victims are ecstatic.
The grief piles on. His total losses could overwhelm him any moment. He may also end up in jail. Add to it his remorse when he goes to the town where the cement company which closed due to his greed and sees the impact of what he has done, not to mention a trap where he was lured with tantalizing promise of inside information and was attacked in the street, his woes are complete.
The insider trading case against him is dropped.
The ending comes fairly swiftly but it is very well told. One of his more interesting books.
8/ 10
– – Krishna
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