King of Torts: John Grisham Continues to Coast
By Leah Stratmann March 27, 2003 Issue

Five minutes after I finished the King of Torts, it was already forgotten. Such is the staying power of the latest edition from the once formidable legal writer John Grisham.

In recent years, Grisham has failed to capture the power of his earlier books, I will still pick up The Firm and re-read it, yet he continues to crank out one or two a year. Shame on us for buying the books and encouraging him to turn out less-than-stellar yarns.

The story opens and introduces the reader to a young lawyer, Clay Carter, laboring with the Washington, D.C. office of the public defender. He had a privileged childhood as the son of a legendary legal eagle, and fully expected to join his father in the office after law school. However, in his last year of law school, daddy barely escapes the clutches of the law himself and flees to the Caribbean. Carter finishes law school and joins the public defender’s office.

To his surprise, he rather likes defending those who really have no defense, but the relatively small salary make his a marginal existence and strains relations with his girlfriend’s social climbing parents. Grisham goes into great detail on the shortcomings of the girl’s father and how his development schemes have ruined northern Virginia. One hopes that somehow the loud-mouthed, Scotch drinking, country clubbing golfer/developer will get his in the end, but the thread is never spun out—just one of several characters introduced who lead nowhere.

Right before Carter’s relationship with Rebecca comes to an end, he is assigned the case of young Tequila Watson. Watson’s young life is a blur of drug abuse and petty crimes—none of which involves violence—yet he stands accused of shooting down another young black man for no apparent reason. Another defense lawyer in to public defender’s office has a similar case in which both accused killers walked out of locked-down rehab centers and committed random murder.

Just as Carter is beginning to investigate these cases more thoroughly, he is summoned to a meeting with the mysterious Max Gage, a self-confessed “fireman” squashing trouble for a variety of clients. Ultimately Gage reveals that both young men charged with the shootings had been part of a clandestine drug test of a pill that eliminated the craving for illegal drugs. The thorn is that one in eight takers of the miracle drug takers will be moved to a random act of violence. The makers of the drug want to settle quickly with the families of the victims and never let the populous know their drug had been tested outside of FDA guidelines and quietly fade into the sunset. Carter is authorized to give $5 million to each victim’s family and collect a tidy $15 million in the process.

With Gage’s help, Carter establishes an office, hires paralegals, lawyers, secretaries and the like. The families are compensated and Gage promises more lucrative suits in the future. With his newfound wealth, Carter buys the requisite sexy black Porsche, a Georgetown home, and acquires a trophy girlfriend. The next case brings in more than $100 million and the once unknown Carter is crowned the King of Torts for his brilliance in manipulating mass tort cases.

Mass torts are those where there are literally thousands of clients suing a manufacturer for producing a faulty product, such as a medication or the makers of tobacco products. The lawyers involved in these suits neither know, nor actually care to know, their clients. The attraction is the payoff: 30 percent of whatever each individual client is awarded. Most of the cases never go to trial, another big plus for the lawyers.

This is another instance in which Grisham shows his disdain for the legal profession in general and in this case mass tort lawyers in particular. Anyone who reads the news and is aware of the enormous judgments awarded in tobacco suits, has an idea of the paychecks these lawyers take home.

The remainder of the book details how Carter deals with his newfound status and wealth and concludes unsatisfactorily for this reader. Your mileage may vary, but this is not a book I would recommend for anything other than an occasion when you just need something to read. (Top)

Doubleday, 376 pages. Get it from the library.

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